P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator powered by Barclays Eagle Labs and the UK’s largest healthcare charity, Nuffield Health, today announced a strategic partnership to accelerate the development and adoption of precision medicine innovations into the independent and public sectors of the healthcare system. This partnership aims to deliver better care faster.
Precision medicine is defined by the European Commission as a medical approach that uses the unique phenotypes and genotypes of individuals to enable doctors and researchers to more accurately predict which treatment and prevention strategies work in specific groups of people. Innovation in this field occurs in small-scale environments such as laboratories and requires significant time in product development and testing before it can be made available to the mass market. Companies typically need a few years to reach a clinical trial stage.
By connecting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) harnessing the power of genomics to advance precision medicine and first-class healthcare providers, the partnership will breakdown the usual barriers to innovation in the field. The SMEs supported by P4’s accelerator programme will benefit from access to interested patients and award-winning facilities of Nuffield Health. This will enable the precision medicine companies to receive direct feedback from patients as they develop their innovations, resulting in more personalised and community-focused healthcare.
Nathan McNally, P4 Co-Founder, says:
“The partnership between P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator and Nuffield Health signifies a landmark milestone in precision medicine innovation in the UK. The partnership builds on our vision to create an ecosystem for precision medicine to scale, accelerating the innovative pathway from research to clinical care. Our goal is to enable patients to receive the best possible predictive, preventive, and personalised care by harnessing the potential of personalised medicine – in particular in the area of genomics. This has led P4 to significantly alter the healthcare landscape in 2020 alone, supporting our portfolio companies to establish collaborations with high-profile organisations such as Genomics England and Great Ormond Street Hospital.”
Chris Blackwell-Frost, Nuffield Health’s Chief Strategy Officer, comments:
“Our purpose is to build a healthier nation and we are dedicated to helping people live healthily, get better and stay well through personalised connected health services. Our strategic partnership with P4’s Precision Medicine Accelerator programme will enhance our ability to clinically innovate across our 31 hospitals across the UK and treat the individual patient rather than just symptoms. Personalised and precision medicine has never been so important. This strategic partnership has the potential to improve the discovery of the underlying genetic causes of diseases, helping us to deliver precision medicine for our patients faster which will improve their health outcomes.”
About P4
Powered by Barclays Eagle Labs, the P4 Precision Medicine Accelerator curates a unique ecosystem to support precision medicine SMEs develop research into world-leading technology, gain regulatory approval as well as adoption into the UK and international healthcare systems.
The delivery of precision medicine requires the academia, healthcare, and industry sectors to work together. Accordingly, P4 offers a 6 to 12-month scale-up programme connecting companies with all these different sectors to create a clear innovation pathway. Together with P4 strategic partners, participants benefit from dedicated workshops, one-to-one expert advice, industry and academic tech expertise, regulatory pathway support, testbeds and trial opportunities, specialised investor introductions and access to key decision-makers.
The programme is led by Professor Phil Beales, Chair of the UCL Institute of Precision Medicine, Professor of Medical and Molecular Genetics at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health and UCL Partners. It is further supported by Capital Enterprise, London’s startup experts. Cross-faculty support led by the UCL Institute for Precision Medicine, leverages the talent pool of academics at UCL and its partners. Capital Enterprise has experience of supporting and scaling tech SMEs as well as providing access to unique funding streams to ensure SMEs thrive.
Recent Achievements: In 2020, the programme helped Lifebit launch a next-generation genomic research platform dedicated to the CoVid-19 response together with Amazon Web Services and Genomics England. It further assisted Motilent with the installation of their new product into Great Ormond Street Hospital and UCLH, a process funded by a recently awarded prestigious UKRI grant. The programme also aided cohort 2020 members WarnerPatch and My Personal Therapeutics to pivot to help tackle COVID-19 and to open a new drug-screening facility in The West Works, White City Place – respectively.
To find out more about P4 and its alumni visit www.p4precisionmedicine.co.uk or follow P4 on LinkedIn and Twitter. .
About Nuffield Health
Nuffield Health is the UK’s largest healthcare charity. For the last 60 years, Nuffield Health’s experts have been working together to make the nation fitter, healthier, happier and stronger, all for the public benefit. As an organisation with no shareholders, income is invested back into the vision to build a healthier nation.
The Charity does this through its day-to-day services across 31 award-winning hospitals, 113 fitness and wellbeing clubs, healthcare clinics, and over 200 workplace wellbeing services, and through flagship programmes to support communities by widening access. Through these flagship programmes, we aim to help to improve the lives of people who normally would not have access to Nuffield Health’s services. This includes a Joint Pain Programme to help people with joint pain manage without surgery, the world’s largest research project into how exercise can help men recovering from prostate cancer, and partnering with schools to provide thousands of pupils with free timetabled programmes to improve their health and wellbeing.
Nuffield Health delivers a sector-leading 94% of hospitals rated as good or outstanding by national regulators. With a breadth of expertise, Nuffield Health provides connected care spanning from personal training and health MOTs to supporting people on their fitness journeys, helping patients recover with physiotherapy or emotional wellbeing counselling, or providing hospital treatments for illness and serious conditions like arthritis or cancer.
Find out more about us and our pioneering models of care: www.nuffieldhealth.com or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
