London-based Closed Loop Medicine secures €275K for COVID-19 and hypertension monitoring

Closed Loop Medicine (CLM), a London based therapeutics and healthtech startup, announced to raise approx. €275K COVID-19 Innovate UK Continuity Funding award in order to support its ongoing clinical research programme previously secured through the Innovate UK Precision Medicine Accelerator.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic outbreak and the resultant global lockdown the CLM’s study was placed on hold. However during the early stages of the pandemic study highlighted the potential for the correlation between high blood pressure and Covid-19 mortality. This is now been reinforced through a recent Nature publication from Liam Smeeth and Ben Goldacre. The publication analyzed 17 million medical records to depict that there’s a correlation between patients with high blood pressure and Covid-19 mortality. The paper calls for more research on this connection.

The lead investigator and clinical trial experts from Queen Mary, Dr David Collier, modified the trial so that there are no hospital visits and all clinical interaction to occur remotely ensuring the social distancing requirements.

David explained that “This was only possible because of our close partnership with CLM. We already knew their dedication to working with our existing patients to develop a truly usable digital app. But in lockdown the Closed Loop Medicine development team worked tirelessly to enable COVID-19 symptom tracking in addition to the existing hypertension monitoring features of the App”. The new trial for the COVID-19 setting is longer, requires far more patient volunteers, as well as increased costs for the delivery of the study.