I'm Neil Stenteford and I'm the founder 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 energize 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 it helps with the quality of sleep. So,
you get a better and deeper quality of sleep and they 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,
and introduction was made from a gentleman called Robin Pepper, who I 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.
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. The University of Derby have helped fund some of the trial that we're
currently running at 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. The benefits of work of 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. 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 University of Derby, because Mark's done this before and Mark
put the project together for us. 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.
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 work with the doctors at the hospital.
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 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 uh through the SOE-MAC. So, it's a really rich and important collaboration for us.
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 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