Clinical research platform uMed raises £10m to tackle slump in UK trials

A medical research technology company founded by an NHS doctor has raised almost £10m in funding to help tackle a sharp decline in clinical trials in Britain.

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

The £9.8m funding round, which also included money from Delin Ventures and Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital, will be used to expand improved access to clinical trials.

Recent data suggests that patient access to clinical trials in Britain nearly halved between 2017 and 2022, with the number of trials initiated in the UK, including cancer trials, falling by 41% during a similar period.

uMed aims to address this issue by enabling healthcare providers in the UK, US and Canada to take part in clinical research and care improvement activity at no additional cost or bureaucratic burden to staff.

Its platform finds and engages suitable patients, and collects prospective data to answer key clinical questions, in turn allowing GPs to generate additional revenue for their practice.

The company said this was aligned with a review of commercial clinical trials in the UK published in May by Lord O’Shaughnessy, who urged the government to provide financial incentives to GPs to help boost the number of trials.

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One use of the funding will be to extend the reach of uMed’s cohort programme in Parkinson’s Disease to several thousand patients globally by the end of the year, it said.

The money will also be used to facilitate the expansion of the company’s presence in North America, with the objective of increasing its global patient access to more than 10 million people by the end of the year.

Dr Matt Wilson, uMed’s founder and chief executive, said: “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.

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“Our ground-breaking 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.”

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 “traditional clinical research model is slow and expensive… [but] uMed provides a unique platform to engage patients at scale in a highly targeted and cost-effective manner”.

The valuation at which the capital was raised was unclear.