Announcement
Gary Doherty (Addenbrooke's Hospital) and colleagues have re-evaluated the processes of clinical research and published new guidlines for 'future-proofing' cancer clinical trials in Nature Cancer.
The UK Coronavirus Cancer Monitoring Project (UK CCMP) continues to make incredible strides in logging the majority of UK cases of COVID-19 in cancer patients.
The CRUK Centre for Drug Development (CDD) will sponsor and manage – at no extra cost to the charity - a nationally-prioritised clinical trial called SPIKE-1 to aid the efforts to find an effective treatment for COVID-19.
Southampton hosts a NIHR Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) with a focus on respiratory disease and our CRUK Clinical Trial Unit (CTU) there has also previously developed some non-cancer lung studies as it is also a NIHR CTU support funded CTU. Southampton CTU has been contributing its CRUK/NIHR staff expertise in study design, development and/or delivery of a number of COVID-19 trials
Technicians, admin staff, QA managers and various pieces of equipment in the Liverpool ECMC have been re-deployed to support the UK Clinical Characterisation protocol, part of ISARIC-4C.
A new report, published in the British Journal of Cancer, outlines recommendations for the effective delivery of Complex Innovative Design (CID) trials in the UK and Europe for the first time.
In February we had the second ECMC Steering Committee. This Committee is a key part of the governance for the network and is designed to ensure that the funders and the network are getting appropriate and timely input on the current activity of the adult and paediatric networks and to provide an independent steer on what the future should look like.
In February 2018, Combinations Alliance supported a two day meeting organised by AACR, FDA, and ASTRO to build on the work done by the joint working group in their landmark paper published in 2016 to boost the number of novel drugs being successfully registered in combination with radiotherapy. Since radiotherapy is one of the principal curative treatment options for patients with cancer, this is a very important initiative to improve treatment further.
Following the evaluation of the success of the Phase 1 of Radiation Assurance and a subsequent period of reviewer recruitment, the HRA have opened Phase 2 of Radiation Assurance and are now accepting all cardiology, neurology, oncology and rheumatology studies taking place in the NHS/HSC.
Following a period of process development and successful reviewer recruitment, the HRA have opened Phase I of Pharmacy Assurance to all Phase I - II/III oncology studies taking place in the NHS.