Emyria Limited’s (ASX: EMD) clinical operations subsidiary, Emerald Clinics, has entered into a global partnership with UK-based Sapphire Medical Clinics.
The partnership will provide a new source of data to bolster Emyria’s growing cannabinoid data platform and allow Emyria to leverage Sapphire’s resources and infrastructure in the UK to provide services to UK patients.
Sapphire is led by several prominent clinicians based at leading medical institutions including Imperial College London and King’s College. Its Harley Street clinic in London was the first medicinal cannabis clinic registered by the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) in 2019 and is the most recognised medicinal cannabis clinic in the UK.
Emyria Managing Director Dr Michael Winlo, said for the first commercial project, Sapphire will become Emyria’s preferred clinical service provider in the UK and Sapphire will provide select, deidentified clinical data based on the use and efficacy of cannabinoid products back to Emyria.
This data will be used by Emyria to enhance the value of its leading real-world evidence data platform which generates revenue from clients wishing to track the safety of cannabinoid products (“pharmacovigilance”) and also enables unique insights to be generated with respect to new diseases that can be treated with cannabinoids.
Dr Winlo said the new partnership allows Emyria to fulfil an IPO commitment to support a clinical service in the UK in a capital efficient manner. The partnership also allows Emyria to accelerate performance of the recently announced data agreement with Spectrum UK – the medical arm of the world’s largest cannabis company, Canopy Growth.
“We’re delighted to be partnering with Sapphire Clinics, the most respected and research-driven medicinal cannabis clinical service the UK.
“Access to medicinal cannabis in the UK is restricted in similar ways to how access was restricted in Australia a few years ago. We know that regulators in Australia and the UK encourage registration of medicinal cannabis and that this requires high quality clinical evidence.
“This Agreement is part of an evolving partnership between our two organisations which will allow us to support a clinical service in the UK while also collecting high quality de-identified clinical evidence that can greatly enhance the utility and value of our Emyria Registration and Emyria Pharmacovigilance data products, which support drug developers with product registration and monitoring.”
The UK medicinal cannabis market is predicted to be worth nearly £1bn (AUS$1.8bn) servicing nearly 340,000 patients.
The project with Sapphire is expected to last up to 24 months and provides total consideration to Sapphire of at most £260,000 based on performance milestones. The Sapphire contract allows Emyria to deliver on the recently announced Spectrum UK data contract worth £400,000 to Emyria and adds to the recent success in securing further data agreements with Spectrum Therapeutics and Zelira in the last six months.