London-based uMed has raised nearly $4.8 million from U.K. and U.S. VCs to help healthcare providers on both sides of the pond participate in more clinical studies.
The investors include U.K.-based AlbionVC, Delin Ventures and Playfair Capital along with Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital, which uMed said in an email to Fierce CRO is “to reinforce the company’s U.S. presence.”
The new funding will be put toward uMed’s platform, which automates processes in running clinical research registries while ensuring regulatory compliance. Its platform can “link some of the richest sources of healthcare data and drive a step change in how clinical and real-world research is conducted,” the firm said.
Its global network currently includes 1.7 million patients in more than 160 primary care sites in the U.K., along with 2 million patients from a large U.S. health system available from early next year.
Its technology is used for a number of clinical research studies including the University of Oxford-led RAPTOR-C19 study, which is comparing the accuracy of different rapid tests for COVID-19 among patients in community settings such as doctors’ surgeries.
The firm was created by Matt Wilson, M.D., a former National Health Service anesthetist and medical officer in the Royal Marines.
“Our technology can support healthcare providers in finding appropriate patients to participate in medical research including large scale patient registries which usually demands laborious, manual processes on top of their already complex and heavy workloads,” said Wilson.
“As our technology is uniquely able to repeatably reach back compliantly from the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to the patients, the process for building research registries can be heavily automated. It means clinicians can focus on patient care, while patients are given the opportunity to participate in many more studies from home with full transparency over use of their health records.”