Dr. Patrick Mooney took an interesting path to the top seat at Echo Therapeutics Inc. (OTC:ECTE), a Philadelphia, Pa.-based company developing a non-invasive, wireless, transdermal continuous glucose monitoring device for the diabetes market.
Mooney, 42, was a surgeon by training before he left medicine for the world of high finance and Wall Street, where he was a biotech analyst for Thomas Weisel Partners LLC and Janney Montgomery Scott. Lured back to the field in 2004 to run biopharmaceutical Aphton Corp. (NSDQ:APHT) for two years, in 2007 Mooney saw something that piqued his interest glinting in the ashes of Sontra Medical — a defunct MIT spinout went for broke developing a next-generation glucose monitoring device.
Click here to listen to MassDevice’s interview with Echo Therapeutics CEO Dr. Patrick Mooney. You can also download an MP3 of the interview by right-clicking.
Sontra, launched in 1998 in Franklin, Mass., went belly-up in December 2006. Mooney said he was attracted by the technology’s pedigree — it came out of Robert Langer’s lab at MIT — and felt that there was still plenty of meat on the bones.
“We saw this play at Sontra and said, ‘Wait a minute, how bad can this be? You have one of the smartest guys in engineering in the world. It’s FDA-approved. We know the technology works. It’s kind of an easy re-do,'” he told MassDevice.
Mooney merged Sontra Medical into Echo Therapeutics in the fall of 2007 and has run the company ever since.
In March, the company reported mixed earnings results for 2010. It had full-year losses of $4.3 million, or 15 cents per diluted share, on sales of $428,460. That compares with losses of $13.5 million, or 61 cents per diluted share, on revenue of $1.3 million in 2009.
Mooney told MassDevice about the Echo story, the company’s Symphony technology and how he hopes to take advantage of the huge opportunity in the diabetes space once the system is commercialized.
Click here to listen to MassDevice’s interview with Echo Therapeutics CEO Dr. Patrick Mooney. You can also download an MP3 of the interview by right-clicking.
