Closed Loop Medicine raises £1.3 million in research grant funding through the InnovateUK Innovation Accelerator, Longwall Ventures and IQ Capital.
Closed Loop Medicine (CLM), the Cambridge health tech start-up that helps doctors and healthcare providers to deliver personalised treatment regimens, has raised £1.3 million in research grant funding from the InnovateUK Innovation Accelerator, Longwall Ventures and IQ Capital. The InnovateUK Innovation Accelerator is a new scheme that enables InnovateUK to match fund a select group of company investors.
This project enables Closed Loop Medicine (CLM) to work with clinical and technology specialists from the William Harvey Research Institute Clinical Research Centre (WHCRC), Queen Mary University of London part of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre at Barts (BRC). The William Harvey Research Institute is an internationally acknowledged centre of excellence in cardiovascular research and therapeutic innovation.
The newly secured funding will be used to support a dedicated research project at the WHCRC to support patients who have had side-effects on tablet treatments better manage and control their blood pressure. One in four adults in the UK has high blood pressure but the condition is poorly controlled in one third of these patients. Lack of management and control can lead to higher rates of heart attacks and strokes.
This project supports CLM’s long-term aim of revolutionising the treatment of blood pressure, so that all patients are well controlled, saving thousands of lives through fewer heart attacks and strokes. More recent research has indicated that better outcomes can be achieved by lowering blood pressure even more than that currently recommended by health providers.
However, by combining blood pressure measurement, drug and non-drug therapies in a closed loop via a smartphone app, CLM will demonstrate that individual treatments can be optimised for patients. The intent is to also empower patients to feel more in control of their treatment, and to be more aware of the broader factors which impact on blood pressure control. This, in turn, will relieve pressures on the NHS.
Dr Felicity Sartain, Chief Operating Officer of CLM said: “We are excited to develop this innovative trial with the William Harvey Clinical Research Centre, who have an international reputation for delivering clinical studies particularly within hypertension. The positive response and encouragement to develop and trial our product from the WHCRC team has been hugely supportive. We are looking forward to bringing a new precision regimen to patients”.
“We believe that our Closed Loop Medicine approach will have an impact on many therapeutic pathways to improve outcomes for patients. As well as developing our own products we expect to partner with pharmaceutical companies to achieve these aims.”
Dr David Collier, Clinical Director of the William Harvey Clinical Research Centre, Queen Mary University of London, explained: “Some of our best blood pressure treatments work brilliantly but are used in crude doses which don’t always fit the individual patient well. Drugs which have proven to prevent heart attack and stroke most powerfully in long term studies can cause unwanted (side) effects which stop or limit their use. By personalising the dose of these most powerful medications we aim to show that we can reduce blood pressure more effectively. Our patients and our TrialsConnect group, who use their stories and expertise to help us improve care, have been excited to join this project.”
Dr Rebecca Todd, Investment Director, specialist health and life sciences investor at Longwall Venture Partners, said: “The InnovateUK Innovation Accelerator funding is a great vehicle to enable companies like CLM to access additional risk funding to support innovative projects at the cutting edge that may be difficult for classic investors to justify funding. We have enjoyed the process of working with InnovateUK UK on this exciting new funding programme and I look forward to seeing CLM take this project forward”.
About Closed Loop Medicine
Closed Loop Medicine is a Cambridge-based therapeutics company focused on care pathways, outcomes and the provision of dynamic personalised regimens. CLM has a development pipeline that integrates Drug + Digital+ Device for the treatment of some of the biggest challenges facing global health systems. For now, CLM is working on treating sleep disorders and hypertension but in the future will be working on other health problems.
By focusing on individual care pathways, CLM can augment proven drugs with digital therapeutics enabling the digitisation and data capture of an entire care continuum for dynamic personalised regimens. Digital therapeutics deliver evidence-based therapeutic interventions to patients that are driven by high quality software programs to prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease.
The founders of CLM have a track record of working together and between them have launched many highly successful commercial enterprises including drugs, digital health, diagnostics and devices. The team has full experience of technology development through to market access, reimbursement and uptake. CLM was founded in 2017. Its HQ is in London.
For more information, please visit www.closedloopmedicine.com or contact Dr Yadi at hakim.yadi@closedloopmedicine.com or on +44 20 3457 0524
About IQ Capital
IQ Capital is a Cambridge-based venture capital firm that invests in UK ‘deep-tech’ across sectors including machine learning, AI, engineering and materials, and data-focused propositions based on disruptive algorithms. All of the firm’s portfolio companies are capable of dominating their respective markets on a global scale. The team typically invest at seed and series A stage, with significant capital reserved to scale companies through their growth stages. Initial investments range from 300k to 5m, with capacity for follow on investment up to £10m.
The IQ Capital team has achieved over 20 exits to date, to companies including Oracle, Google, Apple, Huawei and Facebook and several IPOs. IQ Capital has led 28 investments over the last three years. In 2018, IQ Capital has invested in Apperio, Audio Analytics, Paragraf, and Myrtle – joining other portfolio including Speechmatics, Privitar, Thought Machine, Audio Analytic, Oxford Space Systems, Fluidic Analytics, Divido, Senseye and Spectral Edge. The team are currently investing from their third 125 million fund (IQCF III).
IQ Capital won Seed Fund of the Year at the GP Bullhound Investor Allstars 2018. For more information, please visit www.iqcapital.vc
About Longwall Ventures
Longwall Venture Partners LLP is a venture capital firm investing in innovative, UK based, early stage companies in the healthcare, science and engineering sectors. Based on the Harwell Campus, a leading science, innovation and technology park, located just south of Oxford, Longwall manages three funds: the 30m Oxford Technology ECF, the £40m Longwall Ventures ECF and the £75m Longwall Ventures 3 ECF, which it is currently investing. The Longwall portfolio comprises companies in a range of sectors including scientific instrumentation, next generation sequencing, next generation PV, cancer diagnostics and drug delivery systems, digital health, satellite robotics, IoT security, radar, oil drilling tools and organ perfusion. Longwall Venture Partners LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority.
http://www.longwallventures.com
About the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary University of London
At Queen Mary University of London, we believe that a diversity of ideas helps us achieve the previously unthinkable.
The William Harvey Research Institute (WHRI) was founded in 1986 by Nobel Laureate Sir John Vane, whose ground-breaking work on the mechanisms of action of aspirin fathered research into the role lipids play during inflammation.
Since 1986, the WHRI has grown to become one of the largest pharmacological institutes in Europe, with over 530 clinicians and scientists from 45 countries, offering a multidisciplinary scientific environment devoted to therapeutic innovation in cardiovascular, inflammatory and endocrine diseases.
Our major strength is in bringing together talented scientists with diverse skills, combining disciplines such as cell biology, bioengineering, epidemiology, genomics, immunobiology and pharmacology leading to clinical trials all with the aim of therapeutic innovation.
Our international research environment is made particularly rich through successful and close collaboration with Barts Health NHS Trust, Genomics England and the 100,000 Genomes Project but also from links that further afield with international pharma and biotech companies. This diversity of collaboration enriches our research environment but also provides our students with first-hand experience of the power of cross-disciplinary working.
By providing the highest calibre training and education in a diverse and cutting-edge research environment, the WHRI delivers therapeutic innovation hand-in-hand with developing the next generation of scientists to become the research leaders of tomorrow.