Cambridge health tech company TidalSense has secured £14.2m in funding led by Cross-Border Impact Ventures to expand its AI-powered lung disease test across the NHS and into Europe and the US.

The investment, which also includes returning backers BGF, Airstream Capital and Foresight Group, will fund the rollout of a handheld diagnostic device that can detect chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in as little as five minutes.

It will also support the development of software to diagnose asthma using the same platform.

Donna Parr is managing partner at Cross-Border Impact Ventures.

She said: We look for technology that doesn’t just have a compelling story, but a body of clinical evidence behind it.

“TidalSense has both, with a CEO who has lived the problem she’s solving, and a product that’s already live within the NHS healthcare environment, saving time for patients who have waited years for an answer.

“It is also technology that can improve access to appropriate treatment for COPD sufferers on a global basis and especially for women who are often misdiagnosed.

“This is exactly the kind of impact we want to make with our investments.”

COPD, a progressive condition that restricts airflow and makes breathing increasingly difficult, is the third leading cause of death in England, according to the NHS.

It is responsible for about 30,000 deaths each year and costs the health service an estimated £1.9bn annually.

The company believes its technology could transform how respiratory disease is diagnosed by replacing the need for conventional spirometry in many settings.

Patients simply breathe normally into the handheld device for 75 seconds while artificial intelligence analyses the breath in real time.

A diagnosis is then displayed on screen, allowing clinicians to complete the entire process in around five minutes.

TidalSense says the technology allows clinicians to assess as many as six patients an hour, compared with roughly one an hour using spirometry, which has remained the standard diagnostic test for COPD despite changing little since it was first developed in the 19th century.

Spirometry requires patients to perform forceful breathing manoeuvres and typically needs specialist staff to administer.

TidalSense chief executive Ameera Patel said: “Our ambition is really bold and broad, and it is to have a really significant impact at a population level on chronic respiratory diseases like COPD and asthma.

“We want the test to be available to anyone the first time they present with symptoms, so there’s no bias in accessibility based on where you live, your socio-economic status or your ethnicity.”

Founded in 2013 by chief engineering officer Julian Carter, who holds a PhD in microelectronics and has more than 35 years’ experience developing medical devices, TidalSense has spent more than a decade building the technology.

Its AI models have been trained on more than 2.5 million recorded breaths to identify the distinctive patterns associated with COPD.

The device was introduced into the NHS last year and is now being used by public health providers in Suffolk, north-east Essex, Wales, Glasgow and community lung screening clinics across the south of England.

Women should not feel pressured into an “ideal birth”, health secretary Yvette Cooper has said as she promised major maternity reform.

Cooper has returned to the Department of Health and Social Care 27 years after serving as public health minister under Tony Blair.

She said maternity and child health would be a major focus of her new role, alongside significant reforms to social care.

In an interview with the Guardian, Cooper said the changes should address any pressure on women to pursue a particular birth experience.

Families affected by maternity failures have repeatedly raised concerns that some units were reluctant to escalate medical interventions because of a preference for more natural births.

Cooper said: “I would worry about any mum feeling pressurised that there is somehow a kind of an ideal birth experience to live up to when it’s always different in every case, and you have to follow the evidence, you have to have informed choice.”

As one of her first actions as health secretary, Cooper said she intended to reintroduce binding national maternity standards.

The standards were dismantled during early Conservative NHS reforms and replaced with fragmented arrangements managed separately by individual hospital trusts.

A new maternity taskforce will draft the standards, which will have five central aims.

These include ending regional differences in levels of care and tackling racial inequalities linked to poorer outcomes in deprived areas, particularly for Black and Asian women.

Patient experiences will also form part of how standards are measured, while new targets will aim to identify underperformance before a major scandal develops.

Cooper, who became the first minister to take maternity leave while serving as a junior health minister in the early 2000s, said reports into maternity scandals had been “traumatic” to read and showed that systemic change was needed.

She said: “We’ve always said the NHS is about the cradle to the grave. I want to make it a personal crusade to put the cradle back at the heart of the NHS, and to have much more focus around maternity and child health, the very beginning of a family’s life, making that much more central to the priorities of the NHS, giving it the priority that it really deserves.”

Cooper said discussions about how maternity services could better listen to mothers’ needs had been taking place for the past two decades.

However, she said the emphasis on placing women and families at the centre of care appeared to have been lost.

She said: “It feels incomprehensible that we could be in this situation in the 2020s. I went back to look at some of the things that we’d done 25 years ago.

“And what did strike me was how much we were talking then about women and families being at the centre of care and about listening to women’s views.

“It is really shocking and distressing feeling that has somehow been lost in some of the maternity units where actually it should be the central issue.

“I had a direct interest. I was pregnant at the time. But I am really struck by it now, just feeling like there is this big gap in the priorities that the NHS has been focused on.”

Cooper said she was determined to provide a robust response to Donna Ockenden’s investigations into maternity failures at Shrewsbury and Telford and Nottingham, alongside Baroness Valerie Amos’s national investigation into England’s maternity system.

The investigations highlighted systemic clinical errors, understaffing and toxic institutional cultures. They found that hundreds of infant and maternal deaths were directly linked to failures to listen to mothers and defensive attempts to protect institutions.

Amos’s review faced criticism, including the resignation of an expert adviser over the lack of explicit warnings about “normal birth ideology”.

Families also questioned whether the review’s proposed statutory maternity commissioner would have sufficient independence.

Cooper said she remained committed to introducing the role.

She said: “In the end, the most important people in the maternity services are the mothers, babies, the families. But the point of having a maternity commissioner is to make sure that those issues are championed as part of an NHS.”

She also said reforms needed to address an oppositional culture between doctors and midwives in some trusts over when medical intervention during birth may be necessary.

Cooper said: “The thing that struck me most was the sense of women feeling they weren’t being listened to … And I think that probably does go back to issues around culture.”

Cooper, who served as foreign secretary until recently, said she was prepared for a difficult period in the health role as she sought to implement Andy Burnham’s social care reforms.

She said she remained committed to establishing the national care service announced by the prime minister the previous week.

A longstanding ally of former prime minister Keir Starmer and a former rival of Burnham in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, Cooper said she believed the change of prime minister had been necessary.

She said: “Of course it’s not easy. I really did not think it was possible to win the election when I came back into the shadow cabinet in 2022. It’s only because of what Keir did that we managed to win.

“But we had very difficult local election results … we have to respond to that. But I think we’ve got a sense of energy now.

“All of the things that Andy wants to focus on and drive are also just very much the things that that people are concerned about across the country.”

One in eight mothers in England is now diagnosed with gestational diabetes, after diagnoses of the condition rose by 60 per cent in just five years, according to a major study.

The research found that rates of gestational diabetes increased from around 8 per cent of pregnancies in 2018 to more than 12 per cent in 2022.

Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) develops when the body cannot produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar levels during pregnancy.

It is the most common complication to occur during pregnancy and is associated with a heightened risk of preterm birth, emergency caesarean section, and babies being born either larger or smaller than expected for their gestational age.

The condition is also linked to longer-term health risks for both mothers and their children.

Laura Magee is professor of women’s health at King’s College London and co-investigator on the study.

She said: “Pregnancy outcomes for women with gestational diabetes are still worse than those for women without gestational diabetes.

“Further work is required to address how control of blood sugar and timed birth can address the excess of adverse pregnancy outcomes, compared with the general maternity population.

“Follow-up after birth is also essential, as women with prior gestational diabetes are at increased risk of cardiometabolic disease, including type 2 diabetes mellitus, but also high blood pressure and elevated blood cholesterol, starting within the first year after birth.”

For the study, researchers analysed routinely collected NHS maternity data covering more than 2.3 million mothers and around 2.8 million births across 184 hospitals in England between 2018 and 2022, making it one of the largest investigations of its kind.

The study uncovered marked inequalities in both the prevalence of gestational diabetes and pregnancy outcomes more broadly.

The sharpest rises in diagnoses were recorded among Asian women, among whom rates reached around 23 per cent, and among women living in the most deprived areas, where rates climbed to about 14 per cent.

The disparities extended beyond gestational diabetes.

Black mothers were found to be more likely to experience an emergency caesarean birth, women in deprived areas were more likely to give birth prematurely, and Asian mothers were more likely to have babies born small for their gestational age.

Among these higher-risk groups, researchers found that a diagnosis of gestational diabetes further compounded the risk of preterm birth.

Rising maternal age, increasing rates of obesity and improvements in how data is captured by the NHS are all likely to be contributing to the growing prevalence of the condition, the researchers said.

Notably, they found that changes to gestational diabetes screening introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic did not meaningfully affect the overall upward trend in diagnoses, suggesting the rise reflects genuine underlying changes in the population rather than shifts in testing practice.

The researchers said the findings pointed to an urgent need to strengthen maternity services and improve support for the women at greatest risk.

Experts said the findings also carried implications that extend well beyond pregnancy itself.

Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, clinical director at the British Heart Foundation, said the study was part of a wider pattern of research using large-scale health data to uncover hidden risks.

“Big data research studies like this, which can now analyse millions of healthcare records, are uncovering a concerning rise in conditions which raise people’s chances of having a future heart attack or stroke,” she said.

“Gestational diabetes often goes away after pregnancy, but it can increase women’s risk of future cardiovascular disease.”

Dr Babu-Narayan called on healthcare professionals to routinely ask women about pregnancy-related risk factors, regardless of how long ago the pregnancy took place.

“Healthcare professionals who want to fully understand people’s risk of heart attack and stroke should routinely ask women about risk factors unique to them, such as diabetes or high blood pressure in pregnancy – even if that pregnancy was decades earlier,” she said.

“If you are a woman who has had diabetes or high blood pressure during pregnancy, it is especially important to attend health checks when invited.”