A new £50 million initiative aims to cut the length of time novel medicines spend in clinical trials, enabling patients to benefit from new treatments much sooner.
The UK’s Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence in Clinical Trial Innovation (MRC CoRE CTI), which is being set up in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, will receive £50 million over 14 years with the ambition of transforming the clinical trial landscape. The leadership group for MRC CoRE includes researchers from six UK universities: University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Birmingham and Newcastle University.
The centre will build on the work of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, which developed ‘multi-arm multi-stage’ (MAMS) trial design. Unlike traditional designs, MAMS allows researchers to test multiple treatment arms at the same time and also gives them the ability to drop treatments that don’t show promise and add new ones as they become available.
The MAMS design has already been used in over 80 published trials and provides several advantages, including the ability to test new treatments faster and reduce costs, as it removes the need to set up a new trial for each new treatment available.
The new MRC CoRE CTI 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. It will offer various projects, including MAMS, non-inferiority trials, which test whether a treatment is only marginally better than the current best, and personalised randomised controlled trials.
‘Clinical trials are vital for turning promising research into real treatments, but they often take a long time,’ said science minister, Patrick Vallance, in a statement published on 18 December. ‘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.’
One of the centre’s key areas of focus will be to move away from the current approach of testing a single intervention in a single disease one at a time and instead move to new, efficient ways to test multiple drugs in multiple diseases simultaneously.
Another significant area of focus is using clinical trials to identify minimum ‘intensity’ for medicines, meaning the lowest duration, frequency or dose required for a drug to be effective. This approach could help make certain treatments, such as chemotherapy, less taxing for patients by reducing side effects.
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