Echo Therapeutics Bullish on Recent News (OTC:ECTE)

Importance of Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring

We believe that continuous blood glucose monitoring can be an important part of a diabetes patient’s daily disease management program. Continuous blood glucose monitoring can help plan diabetes treatment, guide day-to-day choices about diet, exercise and insulin use, and avoid unwanted low blood glucose (hypoglycemia) and high blood glucose (hyperglycemia) events and the complications that they can cause. Blood glucose levels are affected by many factors such as the carbohydrate and fat content of food, exercise, stress, illness, and variability in insulin absorption among others; therefore, it is often challenging for diabetes patients to avoid frequent and unpredictable excursions above or below normal glucose levels. Patients are often unaware that their glucose levels are either too high or too low, resulting in their inability to tightly control their glucose levels and prevent the complications associated with unwanted glucose excursions.

In an attempt to achieve and maintain blood glucose levels within a desired range, diabetes patients must measure their glucose levels. The ADA recommends that patients test their blood glucose levels at least three or four times per day; however, despite evidence that intensive glucose management reduces the long-term complications associated with diabetes, industry sources estimate that people with diabetes test, on average, less than twice per day. We believe our Symphony tCGM System has the potential to improve patient compliance to frequent glucose testing, achieve better glucose control and make a positive impact on overall day-to-day diabetes management.

Hospital Critical Care Market

We believe Symphony has the potential to offer a non-invasive, wireless, tCGM solution for use in the rapidly emerging hospital critical care market. A primary cause of infection in critically ill patients is hyperglycemia which is a result of insulin resistance and total parenteral nutrition. Clinical studies have demonstrated that intensive insulin therapy to maintain tight glycemic control significantly reduces patient mortality, complications and infection rates, as well as hospital stays, services and overall hospital costs.

Regular monitoring of blood glucose levels is rapidly becoming a necessary procedure performed by hospital critical care personnel to achieve tight glycemic control and ensure improved patient outcomes. In a recent survey by Boston Biomedical Consultants of more than 60 hospital critical care unit managers and nurse clinicians in the United States, more than 90% of those surveyed acknowledged the benefits of tight glycemic control protocols in the hospital critical care setting. We believe tight glycemic control protocols are becoming the new standard of care in hospital critical care units across the United States, for patients with and without diabetes.

Today, standard practice by critical care nurses is to measure blood glucose at the patient’s bedside periodically. We believe that a CGM system such as Symphony will save valuable nursing time and expense by avoiding the need for frequent blood glucose sampling, in addition to providing more clinically relevant, real-time glucose level and trending information needed to develop better control algorithms for insulin administration.