Catching up with Medtrum. Where are they since the JDRF Discovery Day?

This evening I had the opportunity to meet up with the team from Medtrum that is currently working their way around the UK and Europe, showing off their products to hospitals and attempting to get them to trial the kit. I met up with them this evening to have a look at their products and see how they were getting on.

First up, they are focusing on the pump. This is the item that will be supplied via healthcare schemes, so you can see why it is the focus of their current efforts. The pump, compared to a 722, can be seen below.

Having little experience of Omnipod, these seem to be reasonable pods. The cannula is a 5mm vertical one rather than the 45 degree offering from Omnipod. I was told that the handset, which I had the chance to use here, will soon be getting an upgrade (three to six months time). This one is functional, and very portable. It’s great if you like portable, but perhaps more of an issue if you have poor eyesight.

The following video shows the process for setting up the pump. The reservoir contains the battery and pumping mechanism, and the transmitter is attached to each disposable reservoir. It’s not sexy, but then, does it need to be?

The team are not focusing on the handset shown here and are looking forward to bringing the new one to market soon. It’s a full colour touchscreen, rather than this push button device. They’ll be upgrading the old PDMs for free as part of their programme.

 

The other item they were able to show me was their CGM sensor and inserter and the iPhone app they have built for it. The video shows the sensor applicator which is small, compact, but really well designed. I’m very impressed. The only piece of it that could be tricky is the twist off mechanism for the applicator. There’s not much more I can say on that one.

The iPhone app is, compared with that from Dexcom, worlds apart. It is a much better use of screen real estate, and shows both pump and CGM data. The historical data that the app keeps is also good. I don’t know if the pump data is overlayed onto the CGM data.

You can see that the guys are thinking along the lines of a combined system on the iPhone. I was asked not to take screenshots, but suffice to say that I was much more impressed than I thought I’d be. I was told again, that they were trying to target a price that was aligned with the Libre. It was also revealed that the transmitter is rechargeable.

The CGM kit should be available before the end of the year.

Finally, we come back to the Predictive Low Glucose Suspend that’s built into the A6 platform, which combines the pump and CGM. The team said that they thought this would be available in Europe in three to six months. They are looking at building hybrid closed loop software, and I suggested it might not be such a bad idea if they worked out how they might include OpenAPS or Loop as part of this plan.

So a brief catch up and update. They’ve a few people using the pumps in trials and they’ve provided feedback, some good, some not so good. They were off down to South West England for more presentations and demonstrations to healthcare professionals.

If there is one thing that Medtrum are doing, it’s putting the legwork in to get in front of HCPs in Europe. It would be great to see this stuff being picked up by the NHS as an alternative to Omnipod, if they can get the price right and it proves to have the right level of reliability!