[Neil Stentiford:]
I'm Neil Stentiford and I'm the Founder and Managing Director of SOE health Limited. The company was formed about 10 years ago when we did some work with a German scientist and came up with this new technology that we've miniaturised and put into a small device that sits by the bedside table and runs each and every night, gently sending out what we've called energized or activated oxygen.
Now this helps somebody with breathing problems or sleep problems. So, it helps clear excess mucus; it helps
with the breathing, so you get easier and deeper breathing; and it helps with the quality of sleep. So, you get a better and deeper quality of sleep and then from all of this they get more energy to go about their lives. So for people that are really struggling with energy levels because they're not getting enough oxygen into their bodies, SOE-MAC — which is the product — helps achieve that.
So, I've been working with the University of Derby for about three years. An introduction was made from a gentleman called Robin Pepper, who I'd previously known when he worked at the University of Nottingham. Robin thought there'd be a good fit between what we're trying to do with our product and our technology and one of the doctors at the University of Derby: a gentleman called Dr Mark Faghy, who is an expert in physiological conditions, looking at treatments for people with respiratory problems that are non-medicinal. So, it was a natural fit from the start and the project has proceeded from there.
[Mark Faghy, lead researcher:]
Very quickly we realised that there was an opportunity for us to develop the research base that underpins Neil's product. And that's where we decided to move that forward; for us to formalise the evidence that was collected by Neil anecdotally, in the development and delivery of a series of clinical trials.
[Neil:]
The University of Derby have helped fund some of the trial that we're currently running, which Mark is heading up, and we've helped fund a PhD student, Sam Grimwood, who works for Mark. So, he's involved in two things: both the existing trial doing a lot of the paperwork and liaising with the medics at the hospital, and also, he's running questionnaires on more general aspects of respiratory disorders with patients. And I've taken him to a number of the breathing groups that I go to, and he's now in the process of analysing a lot of data. But, yeah he's going very well and Sam's a good addition to the team.
[Samuel Grimwood, PhD student:]
The benefits of working with Neil, is that it's really helped me gain experience of what the process is in order to get a machine like SOE-MAC in to clinical settings — from Neil's point of view as an industry partner and small enterprise, and also clinically with the clinical researchers.
[Neil:]
We've sold about ten thousand SOE-MAC's around the world and the success of people with respiratory problems is probably 95%. But, we now need to formalise that, and to do that you need to be part of a team that knows what they're doing, and that was the beauty of meeting Mark and the University of Derby, because Mark's done this before and Mark put the project together for us.
[Mark:]
The end result for us at this point in the project is for us to obtain evidence that suggests that the SOE-MAC has a positive benefit for COPD patients and that we can use that to improve the symptom profile and the patient outcomes of those patients.
[Neil:]
Besides accessing the knowledge of Mark and the team, it also gave us great credibility in our discussions with the hospital because they have access to a lot of the patients who we're going to work with and to be part of a team that involves, you know, a senior university and a well-respected academic such as Mark, gives us great credibility to then go and work with the doctors at the hospital.
[Mark:]
So the benefit of working with an industry partner such as Neil, is it allows us to have a collaboration between the industry partner and their expertise, but also the academic expertise that the university hosts as well. So, bringing that together allows us to form a really rich partnership that allows us to accelerate the research, which is obviously important for us in the university, but, also using that research and the expertise to drive the productivity through Neil's business; through the SOE-MAC. So, it's a really rich and important collaboration for us.
[Neil:]
The objective longer term is to get this product recommended by NICE, so that it goes into the NHS, and gets prescribed to every COPD respiratory sufferer in the country — and there are two and a half million of those people, so it's a big opportunity but also a big challenge.
So, next steps in the project are to run the existing trial, to get the results, analyse the data and then the objective is to hopefully run a bigger second trial next year at a number of different centres — so they call it a multi-center trial so maybe Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, Southampton — with an increased number of patients, so perhaps 500 rather than the existing 100. And we've already talked to various government funding bodies to fund this bigger trial and they're very interested. As long as the data from the first trial supports it then, yeah, this is a good project that will progress.