Sensyne Health (AIM:SENS ) has signed a five year non-exclusive Strategic Research Agreement with Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, helping the group surpass its major target of growing its ‘anonymised’ database to 5 million patient records as it set out in IPO in 2018.
The UK Clinical AI firm said the agreement will enable the ethical application of clinical AI research to improve patient care and accelerate research into new medicines. The dataset covers 1.1m unique patient records for a patient population of around 600,000 people.
The Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, which was formed on 1 April 2020, is the first NHS trust in England to provide community, mental health and acute hospital services.
It employs over 9,000 colleagues and provides community and mental health services in Somerset and acute hospital services in the north, west and centre of the county and beyond.
Somerset will receive 1.43m Sensyne shares, or 1.11% of the company while the NHS trusts now own 11.7% of Sensyne. The Trust will also receive an investment of up to £0.25m per year over the five-year term of the contract for specific investments from Sensyne Health.
In addition, the Trust will also receive a royalty on revenues that are generated by Sensyne from the research undertaken under the SRA. The financial return Somerset receives from Sensyne will be reinvested back into the NHS to fund patient care, the company outlined.
Somerset joins six existing SRAs that Sensyne already has in place, including, inter alia, with Oxford University Hospitals, Chelsea & Westminster Hospitals and South Warwickshire.
Shares in Sensyne Health have soared by over 80% in the past three months to open 1.26% higher this morning at 120.5p following the company’s announcement.
Sensyne’s CEO, Paul Drayson, said the SRA will enable research “to improve patient care and accelerate medical research and by helping to grow our overall data set to over 5.6m patients, will now enable us to broaden our research and expand our therapeutic focus.”
The SRA, which brings the combined total of anonymised patient data available for analysis by Sensyne to 5.6m patients, will further enable the ethical application of clinical AI research on this data to improve patient care and accelerate research into new medicines.
In line with its strategy, Sensyne is able to cover research across different clinical areas, ‘deliver powerful data insights to speed up the development of novel approaches to new medicines and develop AI-powered clinical decision support tools to improve patient care.’
Sensyne's business model means the NHS has benefitted from Sensyne's partnership approach in a variety of ways, with ‘long-term benefits potentially to come’, it noted.
Since August 2018, the NHS has received a total financial return of £19,46m, £0.16m of shared revenues and £1m of technology investment through its relationship with Sensyne.
Meanwhile, research conducted by Sensyne using data from previous SRAs has included the areas of stroke prediction, heart failure treatment, COVID-19 lung impact and COVID-19 risk.
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