A new initiative aims to accelerate clinical trials of new medicines for improved patient care.
The creation of a brand-new centre aims to shake up approaches to the design and delivery of clinical trials by developing pioneering ways to speed up the process and drive improvements in treatment and recovery.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) in Clinical Trial Innovation, in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), will receive up to £50m to implement this.
UK Science Minister Lord Vallance stated: “Clinical trials are vital for turning promising research into real treatments, but they often take a long time.
“By investing £50m in this new centre, we’re helping to speed up the process so patients can access life-changing medicines sooner, while maintaining a rigorous process.”
Improving the efficiency of clinical trials
One key area of focus will be to move away from the current approach of testing a single intervention in a single disease, one at a time.
Developing new, efficient ways to test multiple drugs across multiple diseases simultaneously in clinical trials could be a game-changer for both industry and the academic community.
“This is yet another example of the UK leading on innovation in trial design, speeding up the delivery of clinical trials and accelerating the use of targeted, effective treatments and technologies to patients through research,” commented Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR.
Another significant area of focus is using clinical trials to identify the minimum ‘intensity’, such as duration, frequency, or dose, required for a drug to be effective.
For instance, finding the lowest effective dose of a chemotherapy drug could help make cancer treatment gentler for patients by reducing side effects.
Life-changing breakthroughs
Led by Professor Max Parmar, the MRC CoRE will build on the pioneering work of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, which developed the highly innovative ‘multi-arm multi-stage’ platform clinical trials.
These designs have revolutionised clinical trials, making them more flexible and allowing the addition or removal of new drugs for testing over time, depending on results and breakthroughs.
Professor Parmar explained: “Basic science is rapidly producing more understanding of biology and consequently many new interventions to help us in a range of diseases, both by industry and academic routes.
“However, they are too slow and costly, meaning it takes some 20 years to get a new invention from the laboratory into routine clinical practice at great expense.”
He added: “Our goal with this CoRE is to substantially reduce this time so that patients can benefit much sooner from new treatments and also bring the costs of testing new treatments down.”
Expert collaboration from across industry
To ensure widespread adoption, the CoRE will work with more than 60 organisations worldwide, including researchers, doctors, statisticians, drug companies and regulatory bodies to develop and implement these new trial designs.
The leadership group will include researchers from:
- University College London (UCL)
- London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
- University of Cambridge
- The University of Edinburgh
- University of Birmingham
- Newcastle University
