Birmingham joins £50m MRC Centre for clinical trial innovation
Academics at BHP founder-member the University of Birmingham will be part of a new Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence in Clinical Trial Innovation (MRC CoRE) which aims to speed up patient and participant access to new medicines and trials, for improved patient care.
The Centre, in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), will receive up to £50 million over 14 years to transform the landscape of clinical trials – shaking up approaches to trial design and delivery by developing pioneering new ways to accelerate processes and drive improvements in treatment and recovery.
The University of Birmingham will be one of six leading research intensive institutions to join forces to support MRC CoRE, with Professor Thomas Pinkney bringing his expertise in running complex surgical clinical trials including the ROSSINI-Platform trial, the UK’s largest ever surgical trial to make future operations safer.
MRC CoRE will see UK trials move away from the current approach of testing a single intervention in a single disease one at a time. Finding efficient way to test multiple drugs in multiple diseases at the same time would be a game changer both for industry and the academic community.
Professor Pinkney said: “This new funding will give a major boost to the latent potential around the UK to design and run clinical trials for new treatments for participants and patients.
“Birmingham brings a huge breadth of clinical trials experience both here in the UK and around the world, including surgical trials, complex cancer trials including with children, and many more besides. In addition, the West Midlands offers a unique opportunity with clinical trials for working with a diverse population and socioeconomic background, and so we are ideally placed to help accelerate the development of medicines for patients.”
Professor Patrick Chinnery, Medical Research Council Executive Chair explained: “The UK medical research community is very effective at gaining insights about disease biology and developing potential new treatments and interventions, especially in underserved areas such as multiple long-term conditions and rare diseases.
“It is essential to quickly move such interventions forward to the right patients, at the right doses, durations and combinations.”
Leading the world in innovative trial design
A key area of focus are clinical trials aimed at identifying 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.
The MRC CoRE team will be led by Professor Max Parmar will build on the team’s past work which created the highly innovative ‘multi-arm multi-stage’ platform clinical trials. These designs have revolutionised clinical trials to be more flexible, able to add or remove new drugs for testing over time, depending on results and new breakthroughs.
The leadership group will include researchers from the University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Birmingham, and Newcastle University.
Professor Max Parmar, Director of the MRC CoRE in Clinical Trial Innovation, said: “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. Clinical trials are the way in which we evaluate all these new treatments. 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 a cost of some £2 billion. 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.”
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR, said: “Success for this Centre will be having efficient adaptive trials becoming part of the mainstream, in the range of approaches to carrying out clinical trials. With increasingly complex interventions being developed for our diverse population, we’re excited for the UK to be taking a leadership role in innovative trial design and look forward to seeing effective and more targeted treatment regimes being evaluated at pace and informed by novel methodology approaches.”