ResApp kicks off coughing app retrial, hasn’t forgotten horrifying first attempt

ResApp has finally signed on its first US patient in a retrial of its coughing app as the company seeks to forget the first disappointing effort.

The 1667-patient trial of the SMARTCOUGH-C app, designed to diagnose respiratory disease, was supposed to start before winter.

“The main reason for the slight delay was logistics, getting all of the sites back up online, getting all the administrative approvals required together. It’s a bit later than we hoped but we’re still hitting the major part of the US winter,” CEO Tony Keating told Stockhead.

They have two of the three original hospitals on board for the second trial and expect the third, Cleveland Clinic, to approve the second trial “imminently”.

ResApp’s (ASX:RAP) share price collapsed 77 per cent in August last year when the company said the trial hadn’t worked.

Mr Keating said at the time they’d “misjudged the complexities of the US emergency department system and the challenges of running a clinical trial in a US emergency department.”

Some of those challenges involved poor quality of cough recordings and the fact many patients were treated prior to using the app.

The company has made two major changes to the trial around logistics and clinical adjudication, which Mr Keating hopes will produce better results.

He says the first is in improving the environment where coughs are recorded by providing better training and instructions on how to use it, such as turning the television off and making sure no one else is coughing in the background.

The second is they will have one independent team to diagnose coughs from all hospitals, rather than separate teams at each hospital making their own diagnoses.

“It’s only been five months since we came out with the results of the previous study, which we very quickly realised were not a good example of the technology. I’m really proud of the team to be able to turn this around so quickly,” Mr Keating said.

The trial will finish in the middle of the year and Mr Keating says they expect results a week later.

The company’s shares were up 8.24 per cent on the news by midday, to 9.2c.