EEE Student wins award at the Covid-19 Recovery Challenge

EEE Student Robert Nash is one of the co-founders of the Artificial Intelligence Society at UCL, together with Livia Ng (UCL BSc Neuroscience) and Ilias Paniaras (UCL MSc Drug Discovery and Development). CT-X is the name of a start-up born from the Society, which was recently awarded first place at the Covid-19 Recovery Challenge, run by Imperial College Business School’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Club. 

CT-X is developing software to automate patient involvement in clinical trials, speed up scientific advances and ultimately bring health benefits to people sooner. Livia Ng, who is now the CEO of CT-X, has worked in research and industry labs and was confronted with some of the problems in research study recruitment. Livia observed that doctors and nurses spend too much time on recruiting for research studies, which impacts patients and leads to delays in them receiving lifesaving treatment.

Livia, Ilias (COO) and Robert (CTO) have put together a larger team of expertise to look at solving this problem, and moved into UCL’s dedicated entrepreneurship hub earlier this year, where they benefited from mentorship and business advice on how to grow the company further. 

CT-X has developed a patient engagement platform that automates the matching of patients to researchers. Using information such as age, gender and health conditions, it shows patients the most suitable research studies for them. 

“Patients can then browse the research and what it entails and understand it in a transparent way,” says Robert Nash. “Once patients have selected a research study they want to get involved in, we screen them on our platform and, if they’re eligible, we book them in. This simple match and booking system can save doctors, nurses and researchers countless hours in manually intensive work.” 

The CT-X team recently competed against teams from Harvard, Imperial, UCL and ITESM ((Monterrey Institute of Technology) and won the Covid-19 Recovery Challenge.

 “If preparation towards these trials can be completed during the pandemic, we can clear the backlog of work that is currently piling up, enabling unparalleled scientific advancement amidst a global crisis,” Livia says. 

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