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Transcript
We do a diabetes diagnostic product. The product from our perspective is a breakthrough technology in that it has developed a way of detecting night time hypoglycaemia in a non-invasive way.
Night time hypoglycaemia is a major problem for the 40 or 50 million diabetics or people suffering of diabetes who need to take insulin. And the moment you put yourself on insulin you’re at a very much higher risk of having a night time hypoglycaemia event. At night you’re effectively unaware and the risk is, particularly when you’re young, that you develop severe complications. Our breakthrough is that we’ve come up with a way of doing that – non-invasively.
Conceptually it’s very simple. Most people who have approached this have tried to this by looking at the actual blood glucose levels. We’ve bypassed that and that’s why we think it’s a revolutionary change, we’ve looked at, does the brain know you’re about to go into a hypoglycaemia event? And because the brain can only use blood glucose in effect for its fuel, when that level drops too low, the brain sets off a whole set of cascades to stay alive. And what we’re doing is picking that up, non-invasively, through essentially ECG monitors, movement detections and finding the signature that’s specific to hypoglycaemia.
Government support has been really important to us, not only in providing financial resource, but also in a number of other ways. Like, the current Commercialisation Australia Scheme, giving us resources like the Case Managers. John Grew for example who’s our Case Officer on this project has been able to look at issues that we may have let go, or not pushed as hard as we had before and that includes issues like the health economic studies, which are very long term. When you’re in the hurley burley of getting a product out the door that tends to slip but the Case Officer has quite correctly reminded us that we should start now because these things do take a long time.
The part that I notice most about the ATP is that it gives us flexibility to grow. When you’re in early stages you never really know how much space you’re going to need or what kind of resources you want and I found the ATP particularly attractive in that sense, that we could grow, shrink occasionally without any huge financial constraints which usually happen if you’re renting. But the other important part is there’s a lot of like-minded people around who you can talk with, discuss issues.
Without Government support I’d like to think we’d be still OK, but there’s no question we’d be going a lot slower. In this sort of business it is a race, you’ve only got a certain amount of time to get any new product off the ground. The sort of Government support we’ve had has made a big difference to us keeping up with the pace and making sure we’ll get this product out commercially.
We’ve narrowed down to what we think is a very significant market opportunity. We do see this as a, essentially, a two billion dollar market opportunity. Some people actually burst into tears when you mention that a product like this is coming out. So we’re very, very excited about the prospect of being able to get out there with a product and make a difference to diabetics.