March 20, 2008

OmniPod and Reading Tea Leave in the Financial Press.

Insulet Corporation’s Q4 07 Earnings Report Call Transcript is on line. Thanks to SeekingAlpha.com you can go read it yourself.

For those of you interested in ten pages of Q&A between the company and Wall Street analysts go have a read. Normal people well… if you having issues getting to sleep…

So what was interesting?

CGM
They talked about partnering agreements with CGM both Dex and Abbott. Pod is apparently looking to integrate the CGM. They aren’t clear about how that will work. I have to assume it is in the PDA portion not the pod. I can’t see how the stuff another inserter into the pod but they weren’t telling. It was sufficiently important to make CEO Duane M. DeSisto’s introductory comments.

While we always knew OmniPod would emerge as a platform technology other leaders in the diabetes space are recognizing this too. In January we signed a joint development agreement with DexCom to integrate their continuous glucose monitoring technology into the OmniPod personal diabetes manager. We have a similar development agreement with Abbott Diabetes Care to integrate their continuous glucose monitoring system, the Navigator which was just approved by the FDA last week. An OmniPod PDM with either Abbott or DexCom’s technology will combine the proven benefits of insulin pump therapy and continuous glucose monitoring in a single safe, discreet and easy to use system.


Using the Omni Pod to care to deliver medications other than insulin:

Bruce Cranna – Leerink Swann & Company

.. I think you said something about in 2008 a non-insulin product or initiative…

Duane M. DeSisto
Well, since we do not have one finalized we are well down the road with a couple of potential activities here. Both pharma products outside the diabetes space and I guess the best way to put it was we’d be disappointed if one of these didn’t turn into an agreement. So, we have two that we’ve gone through stability testing, flow accuracy testing and we’re well down the way. It is our belief that this is in fact the platform technology and more than us talking about it hopefully we’ll have an agreement in place in 2008 to prove it.

Capacity

There was a lot of talk about monthly pod production numbers and the people and selling effort needed to get those numbers up. More reps hired and trained.

Manufacturing in China

They have invested in production capacity in China and are bringing that on line. There is a fair amount of give and take on this with the company and Wall Street, the Street wanting to know if and when all production will be in China. It was mostly financial talk but there was an interesting bit from the CEO on the difference between making them here and there if equipment breaks.

Phil Legendy – Thomas Weisel Partners
This is the equipment that lets you produce the finished product in China, is that right?

Duane M. DeSisto
Right. What we’re looking for is complete and total product coming out of Asia.

Phil Legendy – Thomas Weisel Partners
How many quarters of good product would you wait to see until you said, “Okay, this is working.”?


Duane M. DeSisto
Our view is pretty much – it really is for us we think it is going to be about a fourth quarter event that we’ll have enough experience that we’ll really know. Because, the trick when you do something offshore like this isn’t the fact that the product works, the question is how quickly can you react when something breaks, one of the pieces of the equipment, is the capability on the ground in a place like Asia to be able to respond immediately and get it back up and working. So, when everything works right it is easy to shake your head and say, “That’s terrific.” The real question is, and like I said the Bedford facility is pretty easy, the engineer is on the second floor, the equipment is on the first floor, they walk down a set of steps. So, what we really want to do is understand that whole interrelationship with the people at Flex once Asia is up and working.

1 comment :

  1. I can't see how they would embed both the insulin catheter and the CGM sensor into the same package. In the case of the Dexcom I've been advised to make sure that it's at least 2 inches away from my pump site.

    Also the Dexcom has a 7-day life span and the Abbot has a 5-day life span. Many of us are restarting these to get more life out of them. How would that fit with the life span of a pod? I think that's currently 3 days.

    I imagine the sensor and transmitter will be kept separate. Combining the receiver functionality into the PDA would be a huge benefit. It means one less thing to carry around. So you've got the PDA and your mobile phone, without the need for an additional receiver.

    ReplyDelete