Medical analysis platform uMed raises £10m to sort out droop in UK trials

A medical analysis know-how firm based by an NHS physician has raised nearly £10m in funding to assist sort out a pointy decline in scientific trials in Britain.

Sky News understands that uMed, which stands for United in Medicine, will announce this week that it has secured the brand new capital from buyers together with Albion VC and Playfair Capital.

The £9.8m funding spherical, which additionally included cash from Delin Ventures and Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital, can be used to broaden improved entry to scientific trials.

Recent knowledge means that affected person entry to scientific trials in Britain practically halved between 2017 and 2022, with the variety of trials initiated within the UK, together with most cancers trials, falling by 41% throughout an analogous interval.

uMed goals to handle this difficulty by enabling healthcare suppliers within the UK, US and Canada to participate in scientific analysis and care enchancment exercise at no further price or bureaucratic burden to workers.

Its platform finds and engages appropriate sufferers, and collects potential knowledge to reply key scientific questions, in flip permitting GPs to generate further income for his or her observe.

The firm mentioned this was aligned with a overview of business scientific trials within the UK revealed in May by Lord O’Shaughnessy , who urged the federal government to offer monetary incentives to GPs to assist enhance the variety of trials.

One use of the funding can be to increase the attain of uMed’s cohort programme in Parkinson’s Disease to a number of thousand sufferers globally by the tip of the yr, it mentioned.

The cash may even be used to facilitate the growth of the corporate’s presence in North America, with the target of accelerating its international affected person entry to greater than 10 million individuals by the tip of the yr.

Dr Matt Wilson, uMed’s founder and chief government, mentioned: “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 ground-breaking affected person cohorts give researchers entry to distinctive knowledge and insights, accelerating growth and entry to new therapies, whereas dramatically lowering the price of discovering, participating and gathering potential knowledge from sufferers.”

Since a seed funding round in 2020, uMed has signed up more than 450 UK GPs representing five million patients, with the company recruiting more than 6,000 patients to clinical studies.

Rosie Barnett, a principal at Delin Ventures, said the “conventional scientific analysis mannequin is sluggish and costly… [but] uMed offers a singular platform to interact sufferers at scale in a extremely focused and cost-effective method”.

The valuation at which the capital was raised was unclear.