LONDON (Alliance News) - Shares in medical artificial intelligence firm Sensyne Health PLC jumped Monday after it announced a "strong" set of maiden interim results and a string of deals with medical and data institutions in the UK and US.
For the six months ended October, pretax loss deepened to GBP10.3 million from GBP3.4 million the year prior. Revenue remained insubstantial.
The loss was widened by a rise in research & development costs to GBP3.2 million from GBP936,000 the year prior as well as general & administrative costs to GBP3.7 million from GBP2.0 million the year before.
As well, a GBP2.7 million cost was incurred associated with Sensyne's listing on the London Stock Exchange. In August 2018, Sensyne listed at 175 pence per share for an initial market capitalisation of GBP225 million.
Shares in Sensyne were 9.4% higher at 170.70 pence on Monday.
"Sensyne Health has made a strong start to its life as a public company and is in an excellent position to capitalise on the growing world-wide demand for data-driven healthcare and RWE," Sensyne Chief Executive Officer Paul Drayson said. "Our business development pipeline is showing good momentum and we believe that Sensyne Health is well positioned for growth and is on track to meet the objectives set out at our initial public offer."
"We expect positive momentum over the remainder of the year with further investments in our teams and business infrastructure as we look to agree further strategic research agreements with new NHS Trusts, progress our R&D programmes, as well as sign collaborations with additional pharmaceutical companies to discover new clinical insights from analysis of real world evidence," Drayson added.
"We are confident of being able to deliver on our vision of becoming a world-leading Clinical AI company creating value, improving patient care and accelerating the development of new medicines," Drayson continued.
In separate announcements on Monday, Sensyne signed strategic research agreements with the Wye Valley NHS Trust and George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust, which will see Sensyne analyse anonymised patient data. In return, the two trusts will take a GBP2.5 million equity stake each in Sensyne at 175 pence per share.
Sensyne also signed a year-long agreement with Jefferson Health to assess the clinical and commericial potential of the GDm-Health digital therapeutic system of Sensyne at the firm. Jefferson are one of the largest healthcare providers in the US states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
"We are delighted to be working with one of the fastest growing and most innovative healthcare providers in the United States to evaluate GDm-Health in the US market, a product that was invented and has proven to be effective in the UK's National Health Service," Drayson said. "We hope that this is the start of a long partnership that forms a new trans-Atlantic bridge for data-driven healthcare innovations to be developed between the United Kingdom and the United States of America for the benefit of our patients."
Sensyne also signed a three-year alliance with the Big Data Institute of the University of Oxford to analyse "unique NHS datasets" in chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular disease using clinical AI to "improve care and accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines".
No financial terms were disclosed for either the Jefferson or Big Data Institute deals.