A major new centre, led by UCL researchers, will seek to improve how clinical trials are run, cutting years off the time it takes to bring life-saving treatments to patients.
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Centre of Research Excellence in Clinical Trial Innovation, in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), will receive up to £50 million in government funding over 14 years.
The centre plans to shake-up approaches to clinical trial design and delivery by developing pioneering new ways to speed up the process and drive improvements in treatment and recovery.
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 to be more flexible, able to add or remove new drugs for testing over time, depending on results and new breakthroughs.
Professor Parmar 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 great expense.
"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.
"We plan for this to act as a hub for ground-breaking developments in clinical trial methodology."
Instead of testing one drug for a disease at a time, the centre will develop new ways to test multiple treatments across several conditions simultaneously and add and remove new drugs from the trial as new results come in. This approach will save time and money, helping researchers bring effective medicines to patients much faster.
The centre will also focus on finding the minimum effective dose or duration for treatments. For example, identifying the lowest effective dose of chemotherapy could make cancer treatment gentler, reducing side effects and improving patients' quality of life.
Science Minister Lord Vallance said: "Clinical trials are vital for turning promising research into real treatments, but they often take a long time.
"By investing £50 million in this new centre, we're helping to speed up the process so patients can access life-changing medicines sooner, with a process that is as rigorous.
"Bringing forward more effective and targeted treatments will also ease pressure on the NHS, helping to improve care for people across the country."
To ensure widespread adoption the CoRE will work with collaborators from more than 60 organisations worldwide, including researchers, doctors, statisticians, drug companies and regulatory bodies both to develop and implement these new trial designs.
The leadership group will include researchers from UCL, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Birmingham, and Newcastle University.
Dr Michael Spence, UCL President & Provost, said: "I congratulate Professor Max Parmar on his leadership of this important new centre, which will develop new ways to get medicines to patients quicker. This builds on the team's past work in transforming how clinical trials are done.
"UCL's wider involvement in clinical trials is extensive. Working with our partner hospitals, we are currently trialling about 30 advanced therapies - on a par with a pharmaceutical company. This is a result of deep collaboration with six major NHS trusts as well as business and charity partners.
"I look forward to seeing the innovations this new MRC centre will deliver to improve and speed up clinical trials worldwide."
Professor Patrick Chinnery, Medical Research Council Executive Chair said: "The MRC is delighted to be supporting this new methodology-focused CoRE towards faster patient impact of our research, especially with their plans to address underserved areas such as multiple long-term conditions and rare diseases."
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR, said: "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."
