Healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) company Drayson Technologies has signed a multi-million-pound agreement to help commercialise digital health tools invented in Oxford.
The London-based company said that the five-year strategic research agreement (SRA) with the University of Oxford and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (OUH) ensures that the technologies can be commercialised, bringing benefit to patients across the NHS and overseas.
It also means that some of the profits will go back into the NHS Trust and the University of Oxford to benefit more patients and fund more research.
As part of the agreement, Drayson Technologies will sponsor “significant further research” and clinical validation of new digital health products over the next five years.
To support the SRA, the company has raised £10m in Series C funding through an investment round led by Woodford Investment Management.
Drayson Technologies expects the work to enable the company “to continue its mission to understand the health of an individual in the context of their environment and generate actionable information and discoveries that improve health and reduce healthcare costs”.
Lord Paul Drayson, the company’s Chairman and Chief Executive, said: “Chronic disease affects the lives of millions of people as well as accounting for around 70% of NHS costs. Digital health technologies offer the potential to make a huge difference for these people and save money for the NHS. This highly innovative partnership will ensure that there is a pathway from invention to commercialisation for digital health products created in Oxford that will deliver benefits to patients and reinvestment back into the University and the NHS Trust.”
Professor Lionel Tarassenko, Head of the Department of Engineering Science, whose research group developed the digital health products in partnership with the OUH Trust, added: “Our work with wearables, smart devices, and machine learning algorithms has enabled the delivery of real-time, personalised healthcare to patients where it is most needed, from the hospital to the home. The partnership with Drayson Technologies gives us a unique opportunity to accelerate the development and deployment of these digital health products across a wide spectrum of conditions.”
