ResApp Health : Establishes COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Board

View printer-friendly version

Brisbane, Australia, 8 December 2021 - ResApp Health Limited (ASX:RAP), a leading digital health company developing smartphone applications for the diagnosis and management of respiratory disease, today announced the establishment of a COVID-19 Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). The COVID-19 SAB will provide scientific and clinical advice to ResApp's COVID-19 programs which are focused on delivering COVID-19 screening and disease management tools.

The first appointees to the COVID-19 SAB are four leading clinicians from the United States and Australia:

Professor Elizabeth Talbot is Professor of Medicine in the Infectious Diseases and International Health Section at the Geisel School of Medicine, at Dartmouth (USA). Additionally, she is the Deputy State Epidemiologist for the State of New Hampshire in leadership for COVID-19 response, Director of International Health Clinic at Dartmouth, and a tuberculosis Technical Consultant for the Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute. Previously Professor Talbot worked for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and engaged in clinician education in West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak.

Professor Catherine Bennett is the inaugural Chair in Epidemiology and head of Deakin Epidemiology within the Institute for Health Transformation at Deakin University. This follows more than eight years with the University of Melbourne where she was Associate Professor in Epidemiology and Director of Population Health Practice in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. Her expertise is population-based research into community transmission, and she is actively engaged in multi-country COVID-19 research, and regularly appears in the media internationally providing expert commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Bennett has a distinguished career in public health practice, research, academic governance and teaching.

Associate Professor Mark Howard is the Director of the Victorian Respiratory Support Service and Institute for Breathing and Sleep at Austin Health. He is a specialist physician in respiratory and sleep medicine. He is Clinical Associate Professor at The University of Melbourne and Adjunct Associate Professor at Monash University. Associate Professor Howard has been actively engaged in managing COVID-19 patients, establishing a post-acute COVID-19 clinic at Austin Health and is widely published on COVID-19 including work with the US CDC on risk factors and public compliance with management strategies.

Associate Professor Paul Porter is a current ResApp Scientific Advisor and has been the Principal Investigator on several of ResApp's foundational clinical trials. He is a Consultant Paediatrician with subspecialty training in Paediatric Emergency Medicine. He is the Chair of the Ramsay Health Care Group Human Research and Ethics Committee (Western and South Australia) and is the scientific lead for the Partnership in Heath Intelligence research group in Perth, Western Australia. Associate Professor Porter is a director of Valo Therapeutics, a Finnish immunotherapy company that is developing a pan-coronavirus vaccine using peptide coated non-replicating adenoviral vectors targeting conserved structural proteins.

Professor Elizabeth Talbot said: "I'm excited to join ResApp's COVID-19 SAB and lend my direct experience and knowledge of managing COVID-19 and other epidemics to the development of this transformative technology. There remains significant unmet clinical need in the diagnosis and management of COVID-19 disease and we will require easily scalable and accurate solutions to manage this virus for many years to come, even more so in low resource settings."

Professor Catherine Bennett said: "I am delighted to be appointed to ResApp's COVID-19 SAB. I look forward to working with my fellow advisory board members to provide scientific advice on the development and implementation of ResApp's novel technology to support the ongoing management of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we have seen from the early days of COVID-19, twists, turns, new variants - like Delta and the emerging Omicron - and waves of infection are common and that's why we must keep innovating and finding new ways to diagnose and manage COVID-19 in all its forms so we can all get on with living with COVID-19 not fearing it."

CEO and Managing Director of ResApp Health, Dr Tony Keating said: "We are proud to have attracted a panel of high calibre and experienced clinicians to our COVID-19 SAB. Collectively, this panel brings many years of experience in public health, epidemiology, and infectious and respiratory disease. We look forward to working with this panel of talented clinicians to optimise our research and development of tools for COVID-19."

###

About ResApp Health Limited

ResApp Health Limited (ASX: RAP) is a leading digital health company developing smartphone applications for the diagnosis and management of the respiratory disease. ResApp's machine learning algorithms use sound to diagnose and measure the severity of respiratory conditions without the need for additional accessories or hardware. ResApp's regulatory-approved and clinically validated products include ResAppDx, a smartphone-based acute respiratory disease diagnostic test for use in telehealth, emergency department and primary care settings; and SleepCheck, a smartphone application which allows consumers to self-assess their risk of sleep apnoea. Both products are CE Marked in Europe and TGA approved in Australia. For more information, please visit www.resapphealth.com.au.