PneumoWave & King’s College London Collaborate in Clinical Trial
January 19, 2022
Digital therapeutics company PneumoWave (formerly known as Altair Medical) announced today the use of their monitoring platform in a clinical trial led by Professor Sir John Strang at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London.
PneumoWave’s respiratory monitoring platform will be included in the trial to collect breathing data from patients at risk of experiencing slow and shallow breathing – respiratory depression – as a side effect of opioid medication. Without treatment, respiratory depression can cause life threatening complications, contributing directly to the annual toll of 150,000 opioid overdose deaths globally. It is hoped that findings from the trial will lead to the development of life-saving interventions to prevent drug related deaths – now the largest cause of accidental death in most developed countries.
Building on extensive previous research undertaken by the team at King’s IoPPN, the trial is taking place in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)-Wellcome King’s Clinical Research Facility which is supported by the NIHR Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre. It is expected to be the first trial in an ongoing collaboration between PneumoWave and King’s IoPPN during the development and validation of PneumoWave’s core technologies. This trial is part of a national program of clinical research as the company develops digital health and therapeutic solutions for a range of respiratory conditions.
PneumoWave Biosensor and Patient Gateway.
Dr Bruce Henderson, founder and CEO of PneumoWave, commented “The technology behind PneumoWave was specifically developed to reduce deaths from respiratory conditions. The research facilities at King’s College London, and their highly skilled team, make it one of the few places in the world where the data we require can be safely captured.”
Professor Sir John Strang, head of Addictions at IoPPN, King’s College London and theme lead for Substance Use at the NIHR Maudsley BRC added “Working together with my team, I am very excited about this new collaboration and its potential to apply science to make the world a safer place for one of our most vulnerable groups. With drug-related deaths at an all-time high in the UK and globally, we need to develop better ways to reduce this loss of life. It is essential that we drive new scientific studies and develop new technologies that have real potential to save lives.”
Professor Peter Goadsby, Director of the NIHR/Wellcome Clinical Research Facility said: “Professor Sir John Strang is a pioneer in the development of therapeutic approaches to protecting a very vulnerable group. We are pleased in the Clinical Research Facility to have a role in the development of this cutting-edge approach to a life-threatening problem.”
About PneumoWave:
PneumoWave is a development stage digital therapeutics company based in Scotland and the US. The company’s proprietary digital technology provides real-time physiological data and patient-centric digital biomarkers with the core focus of preventing deaths and reducing hospital admissions from respiratory causes. Performance characteristics are not yet established.
About NIHR/Wellcome King’s Clinical Research Facility
Jointly funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the Wellcome Trust, the CRF is a pioneering collaboration between King’s College London, its NHS partners, King’s College Hospital, South London and Maudsley (SLaM), and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trusts, and the pharmaceutical industry to facilitate world leading research across physical and mental healthcare.
About King’s College London and the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience
King’s College London is one of the top 35 UK universities in the world and one of the top 10 in Europe (QS World University Rankings, 2020/21) and among the oldest in England. King’s has more than 31,000 students (including more than 12,800 postgraduates) from some 150 countries worldwide, and 8,500 staff. King’s has an outstanding reputation for world-class teaching and cutting-edge research. The Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s is the premier centre for mental health and related neurosciences research in Europe. It produces more highly cited outputs (top 1% citations) on mental health than any other centre (SciVal 2019) and on this metric we have risen from 16th (2014) to 4th (2019) in the world for highly cited neuroscience outputs. World-leading research from the IoPPN has made, and continues to make, an impact on how we understand, prevent and treat mental illness and other conditions that affect the brain.
www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn @KingsIoPPN
The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR)
The mission of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. We do this by:
- Funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care;
- Investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services;
- Partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research;
- Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges;
- Collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system;
- Funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries.
NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK Aid from the UK government.
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