By: Tomas Ronolski - AllPennyStocks.com News

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Ever had a funky heartbeat? You’re not alone as about half of the world’s population has cardiac arrhythmias, simply meaning that the heart doesn’t beat as it typically should. Many arrhythmias are harmless, but there are others that are cause for concern, such as ventricular fibrillation, a condition where chaotic electric signals are sent throughout the lower chamber of the heart, causing it to quiver and eventually stop beating. Atrial fibrillation is in the upper chambers and while not life-threatening, increases the likelihood of a stroke. Because of the often erratic nature of arrhythmias, they can often be difficult to diagnose. The most common choice of physicians is a Holter monitor, a sort of portable electrocardiography, or ECG, device the uses leads and a central processing unit to continuously record cardiac activity. The data collected on the CPU is sent to a cardiologist for analysis. Historically, the diagnostic yield hasn’t been that great from event recorders, ranging around 65% at best. Anyone who has ever had to wear a Holter monitor for a couple weeks as a means to try and pinpoint an arrhythmia knows that they can be a nuisance with patches stuck to the skin, wires dangling, and the central unit hooked to a belt or on a lanyard around the neck. The landscape for Holter monitors is getting better anyway with companies developing new technologies to better capture arrhythmia events while making the system more comfortable. San Francisco’s iRhythm Technologies markets the ZIO XT Patch, a one-lead ECG sensor (no bulky CPU or wires) that is stuck to the patient’s chest for 7-14 days of continuous monitoring. Once the prescribed time is over, the patient peels off the ZIO patch and sends it to iRhythm for analysis via proprietary algorithms with a final report sent on to the physician. Researchers at the Scripps Translational Science Institute reported that clinical studies showed the ZIO patch leads to definitive diagnosis 90 percent of the time.

New York’s Event Cardio Group Inc. (OTCQB:ECGI) is making a bid to step up the technology too. The company, which had no operations since December 2008, went through a name and ticker change from Sunrise Holdings Limited and “SUIP” to its current state as the result of a recently completed reverse merger. Event Cardio trumpets its in-development Now Cardio as the world’s first non-invasive continuous heart monitor device that is both leadless and wireless, conducting both a loop recorder and Holter testing simultaneously. The company says that Now Cardio is being designed to be able to transfer data for intervals lasting up to 60 days and expects that the device will be able to receive both atrial and ventricular data from as far away as 1,000 feet away from the home-based receiver. Using any number of data transmission vehicles (landline, cellular, satellite, etc.) the data will be sent to a control center for continuous monitoring all day, every day. Event Cardio believes it can achieve definitive diagnostic yields in excess of 90 percent.

It is, of course, notable that Now Cardio is still in development and these claims need to be validated with a final device, which will still need to gather appropriate FDA and other countries’ regulatory approvals to commercialize.

On Wednesday, Event Cardio Group announced that it has finalized its acquisition of full intellectual property and development rights for Now Cardio. This goes into the company’s portfolio with BreastCare DTS, a patented, non-invasive device with FDA-clearance as an adjunct to mammography and other established procedures for the detection of breast disease, including breast cancer. Event Cardio (through its subsidiary Efil Sub of ECG Inc.) has exclusive rights from Life Medical Technologies to distribute BreastCare DTS in the United States, Canada, China and certain other Asian countries. Research showing the effectiveness of BreastCare DTS, which compares temperatures in area of the breasts via wafer-thin foil sensors to spot potential problems, has been conducted at some of the leading cancer research centers in the world, including M.D. Anderson and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital.

The company says it is focused on bringing BreastCare DTS to market in 2015 and is nearing completion of negotiations for production. ECGI is a thinly traded stock that has made an impressive climb since March, rising from 2 cents a share to as high as 19 cents on the last trading day of October, before moving down in November. As the day winds towards a close, shares are down 4.5% at 15 cents, equating to a market capitalization of $12.9 million, based upon the 86.1 million shares stated as issued and outstanding in the company’s latest SEC filing.

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