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uMed raises £9.8m to revolutionise clinical trials and to escalate US expansion

Healthtech

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

Having led the company’s seed round in 2020 we continue to be excited by their mission to revolutionise how clinical trial research is conducted globally.

The UK is facing a collapse in industry clinical trials. uMed directly tackles this issue by enabling healthcare providers in the UK, US and Canada to more easily participate in clinical research and care improvement activity without additional cost or burden to staff. Its platform rapidly finds and engages suitable patients, and collects prospective data to answer key clinical questions, while also 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. Additionally, uMed will be launching a Cardio-Metabolic Cohort and Lung Disease Cohort. It will initially focus on interstitial lung diseases like pulmonary fibrosis which is being developed with US research charity the Three Lakes Foundation.

uMed’s founder and CEO, Dr Matt Wilson comments: “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.”

“At AlbionVC we are thrilled to continue partnering with Matt Wilson and his team to enable longitudinal research which has historically taken decades and cost millions of pounds. uMed’s technology is uniquely positioned to truly revolutionise how clinical research is conducted globally. The latest round of funding will continue to support company’s US expansion and will further accelerate the next phase of growth on a path to global category leadership.”

Molly Gilmartin, Investor AlbionVC

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. This follows uMed’s inaugural Canadian partnership with clinician-led healthtech MCI Onehealth. These moves will be closely followed by a pipeline of deals that include direct health systems access and additional channel partners which will give uMed access to over 10 million patients by the end of 2023.

Since its 2020 seed round, uMed’s technology has enabled a number of successful nationwide studies to take place across the UK, including a prospective precision medicine clinical trial for patients with high hypertension and a nationwide study into identifying risk of Parkinson’s Disease.

Watch the interview with Matt Wilson, CEO & founder uMed on Sky News here.