Closed Loop Medicine partners with US trial to find COVID-19 and hypertension link

Closed Loop Medicine, a UK therapeutics company, will launch clinical trials in the US to find links between Covid-19 and hypertension.

The Cambridge-based company is working with Curebase, a San Francisco based clinical trial specialist, on research which will help to understand the relationship between high blood pressure and COVID-19. Data from across the globe has shown there to be a relationship between COVID-19 infection, patients with high blood pressure and overall outcome. Sadly it seems patients with high blood pressure fair worse than those with controlled blood pressure.

Curebase will operate a dedicated clinical trials platform (CURE-19) for running at-home COVID-19 studies which any patient in the United States, no matter where they live, can sign up for and start participating in studies right at home.

Closed Loop Medicine will make its App, specifically developed for hypertension research, available on the CURE-19 platform to enable patients to monitor symptoms, drug regimen and blood pressure while patients are at home.

The data from the overall study, CURE-19, will then be de-identified and integrated into a first of its kind dataset to enable the discovery of critical new biomarkers to be used in the fight against COVID-19.

Closed Loop Medicine is expecting to launch the trial imminently and it is estimated that results of the trial should be ready for analysis later this year.

Dr Paul Goldsmith, CLM’s President, Chief Innovation and Medical Officer, said: “Hypertension has emerged as a key risk factor for adverse COVID-19 outcomes. With over half of the older adult population having hypertension, this is of great concern to many, including CLM. We therefore without hesitation offered our digital hypertension platform to generate anonymised data as part of the CURE-19 platform and provide this to researchers analysing key COVID-19 questions.”

Tom Lemberg, Founder of Curebase said ‘’Curebase has been running decentralised clinical trials for years, but the need has never been greater than during COVID-19. With the CURE-19 platform, any U.S. patient can enroll into clinical studies right at home and help drive scientific discoveries.”

Dr Hakim Yadi OBE, CLM’s Chief Executive, added: “We are delighted to be partnering with Curebase and helping in the global effort to beat COVID-19.”

Original article published here.