OXFORD MEDICAL PRODUCTS AWARDED £1.25 MILLION GRANT FROM INNOVATE UK TO FUND FIRST-IN-HUMAN TRIALS OF ITS ACCESSIBLE AND AFFORDABLE WEIGHT-LOSS TREATMENT.

• Oxford Medical Products (OMP) is tackling obesity, one of the world’s toughest healthcare challenges, by combining the knowledge and skillsets of entrepreneurs, material scientists and surgeons.
• OMP has partnered with University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust to carry out the first-in-human clinical trials of its proprietary weight-loss hydrogel Sirona.
• OMP in collaboration with UHS has been awarded a £1.25 million grant from Innovate UK’s Biomedical Catalyst 2022 competition to fund the pilot clinical trial.

Oxford, UK. 13^th April 2023 – Oxford Medical Products (OMP) today announced that it has been awarded a £1.25 million grant from Innovate UK’s Biomedical Catalyst 2022 funding competition to accelerate clinical development of its breakthrough, hydrogel-based weight-loss treatment Sirona. Working in collaboration with University Hospital Southampton (UHS) NHS Foundation Trust, OMP is carrying out first-in-human clinical studies to progress Sirona towards commercialisation.

Sirona is designed to achieve significant weight loss by reducing appetite. The hydrogel is taken orally as a pill, expanding rapidly once in the stomach to occupy physical space and reduce hunger. With excessive weight affecting 1.9 billion people globally and current treatments too expensive and resource-intensive to tackle the scale of the problem, OMP aims to provide an affordable and effective treatment to hundreds of millions of people who currently have limited options.

Dr Camilla Easter, Chief Executive Officer of OMP, said: “Our aim is to develop a weight-loss solution that empowers people to successfully lose weight and maintain a healthy weight long term. We have developed a scalable weight loss solution that can be taken at home and ultimately made available to hundreds of millions of people living with excessive weight. This Innovate UK grant helps to support the later phase of our pilot clinical trial, ensuring the right data is generated to allow OMP to accelerate towards pivotal trials and regulatory approval.”

Innovate UK funds business and research collaborations to accelerate innovation and drive business investment into research and development. This is the first Innovate UK grant that OMP has received in support of the development of Sirona and follows successful pre-clinical development of the hydrogel-based weight-loss treatment.

Mr James Byrne (MD, FRCS), a consultant surgeon at UHS and Chief Investigator for the first-in-human clinical trial said: “I am excited to be working with Oxford Medical Products who, through Sirona, have developed a completely original approach to the serious problem of obesity. Our research team at the Southampton Biomedical Research Centre are working with research leaders at the University of Oxford to evaluate this intervention with cutting edge technology and digitally driven data capture. I am very proud to be in the team performing this critically important research”.

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