Huma calls for safeguarding of scientific collaboration to tackle global health challenges during event at World Economic Forum
LONDON, May 18, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Huma, a global digital health technology company and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community, calls for the commercial sector to ‘recognise the value of scientific collaboration’ and build on the innovation to help people live longer, fuller lives seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dan Vahdat, Huma CEO and Founder, will join leading scientific experts as a panellist on the ‘Safeguarding Global Scientific Collaboration’ session at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland on 23 May to discuss the importance of scientific collaboration and the actions needed to create an environment that encourages continued cooperation post-COVID.
COVID-19 showed that rapid scientific advances can be achieved through global collaboration across disciplines, geographies and sectors. Before COVID-19 it took four years to develop the mumps vaccine, which was the fastest any vaccine had been developed. Through international cooperation, multiple safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines were developed in less than a year.
“Far too many people were dying too young even before the pandemic and political instability caused waves around the world,” said Dan Vahdat. “COVID-19 exposed the glaring inequalities in global health, the gaps in our knowledge and the faults in our systems. But it also showed us what’s possible. Changing our thinking, moving to a digital-first approach to care and research means we can run research without borders, offer cutting-edge care and the latest medical knowledge anywhere with a phone signal. Just as when tackling vaccine supplies, human rights or global emissions, we need the will to come together as a movement and push for change.”
When the pandemic stretched healthcare services and made traditional clinical trial setups impossible, the world had to switch to try digital-first approaches. Technology ended up playing a critical role in connecting scientific and clinical collaborators worldwide and bridging gaps in care and research. Huma saw this first hand in collaborative projects with tech, pharmaceutical and logistics giants that enabled Huma to deploy not-for-profit ‘hospital at home’ services across the UK, Germany and UAE which saw up to four times lower mortality rates1, 40% shorter hospital stays1, and clinical capacity almost doubled2. At the same time the platform was chosen to power a multi-country, multi-language vaccine trial and the world’s largest app-based trial of its kind into asymptomatic COVID-19 cases with the University of Cambridge.
“At Huma, we’re powering a movement to accelerate digital-first delivery of care and research,” continued Vahdat. “We’ve seen how a rethink changed what we did during COVID-19, but we’ve also been joined in our efforts by leading life science companies and universities in the US and across Europe demonstrating how trials can be run differently even for complex cases like atrial fibrillation, diabetes and cardiac surgery. Each time it has relied on close collaboration with healthcare providers, life science companies, universities, clinicians and, most importantly, patients. We do this for them, and with them.”
“The World Economic Forum provides leading start-ups like Huma a platform to help tackle important problems such as providing more resilient, efficient, and equitable healthcare systems,” said Verena Kuhn, Head, Global Innovators Community at the World Economic Forum. “Scientific collaboration is vital in finding such healthcare solutions and Huma can provide important insights into how digital can be better leveraged in public-private health care collaboration.”
In March, Huma announced a new partnership with AstraZeneca to accelerate innovation for digital health with Huma acquiring their AMAZE platform. The collaboration saw AstraZeneca join Huma’s family of partners across healthcare, life sciences, research and technology who are supporting the company to scale their offering across different disease areas and power ‘Hospitals at Home’, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) solutions and decentralized or hybrid clinical trials.
Dan added: “Our mission to help people live longer, fuller lives depends on global collaboration not competition, and we’re committed to sharing the knowledge and evidence we gain with others to support more proactive, personalised patient care on a global scale. With COVID-19 we truly understood how communicable disease cannot be contained by geographical boundaries and now we can ensure we leverage the same mindset and innovation adopted during the pandemic to tackle the biggest killers of our times – cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.”
Huma has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community since January 2021. The community is an invitation-only group of the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups that are at the forefront of ethical technological and business model innovation.
About Huma
Huma Therapeutics is a global digital health technology company that advances digital-first care delivery and research to help people live longer, fuller lives. Huma’s award-winning modular platforms are used by more than 3,000 hospitals and clinics, with 1.8 million active users. Huma’s offering works across different disease areas and powers:
- ‘Hospitals at Home’
- Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) solutions
- DCT platform to support digital or hybrid studies
Huma’s platform has been shown to almost double clinical capacity2, reduce readmissions by over a third, enable better diversity, participant retention and protocol adherence, whilst allowing trials to run within weeks. Please visit www.huma.com and follow us on LinkedIn at Huma.
Media Contact
Ed Sykes; Ed.Sykes@huma.com
References
- Lim, A. et al. An Outpatient Management Strategy Using a Coronataxi Digital Early Warning System Reduces Coronavirus Disease 2019 Mortality Open forum infectious diseases (2022) 9(4), ofac063 DOI: 10.1093/ofid/ofac063
- NHSX report: https://www.nhsx.nhs.uk/covid-19-response/technology-nhs/huma-medopad-evaluation-remote-digital-care-platform/. The full report is available on request.
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