London based healthtech expands into US market via seven-figure funding round

uMed, a health and research technology company, has raised £9.8m in its latest venture capital funding round, which it will use to boost participation in clinical trials. The raise is backed by Delin Ventures, AlbionVC, Playfair Capital and Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital.

The UK is reportedly facing a collapse in industry clinical trials. Patient access to industry clinical trials has dropped by 44 per cent between 2017/18 and 2021/22, and the number of trials initiated in the UK, including cancer trials, plummeted by 41 per cent in a similar time frame.

The uMed platform finds and engages suitable patients, and collects prospective data to answer key clinical questions, while enabling GPs to generate additional revenue for their practice. This is in line with last month’s review by Lord O’Shaughnessy which urged the Government to provide financial incentives to GPs to help boost commercial clinical trials.

The latest funding round will extend the reach of uMed’s “landmark” cohort programme in Parkinson’s Disease, Access-PD, to several thousand patients globally by the end of the year.

Access-PD, which already has over 350 participating patients in the UK via more than 130 GPs, is the first true population-scale research platform and closes the fundamental gap between the clinical data needs of researchers and their ability to access that data.

This is achieved by creating consented cohorts that integrate near real-time Electronic Health Record (EHR) data with prospective data and biosamples captured from the patient at home.

uMed’s founder and CEO, Dr Matt Wilson commented: “We developed the uMed platform to help healthcare professionals more easily and efficiently run patient research and targeted care programmes at scale, improving outcomes for patients by mitigating care gaps and accelerating research.

“Our groundbreaking patient cohorts give researchers access to unique data and insights, accelerating development and access to new therapies, while dramatically reducing the cost of finding, engaging and collecting prospective data from patients.”

The North America expansion builds on uMed’s UK successes, since its seed round in November 2020, uMed has signed up more than 450 UK GPs representing five million patients, and has successfully recruited over 6,000 patients to clinical studies.

The entry into the US market will be spearheaded by a partnership deal with digital healthcare company Innovaccer, opening up access to over seven million patients across the country.

By Matthew Neville – Senior Correspondent, Bdaily

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