Watch video interviews with the co-directors of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit - <em>News</em>
By Lucy Goodchild
Thursday 4 February 2010
A new unit dedicated to setting up and running clinical trials was launched yesterday at Imperial College London.
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Clinical trials are carried out to determine whether new drugs and therapies are safe and effective for use in people.
The co-directors of the new Imperial Clinical Trials Unit (ICTU) hope it will build on the existing trials being carried out at the College to create a centre of excellence for clinical trials of treatments for conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer and mental health problems.
Clinical trials are carried out in phases: after testing in the lab, a Phase I clinical trial is carried out to determine whether a treatment is safe for humans. Phase II and III trials are then completed to find out if the treatment works; for example, to see what effect a new drug for preventing heart attacks has on the heart attack rate in patients. Finally, Phase IV trials monitor and assess the safety of drugs once they have been licensed for widespread use. The process may take up to ten years, during which time the conduct of the trial must adhere to strict guidelines and standards.
The ICTU will provide a central resource to help scientists apply for funding, design and carry out trials, and analyse their results. It will bring together clinicians, statisticians and trial managers with expertise in every aspect of running clinical trials.
Professor Deborah Ashby, Co-Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit, from the School of Public Health at Imperial College London, said: “Clinical trials can be very complex things to set up, with funding applications, ethical considerations and trial design to do before you’ve even started. To run a successful trial you need expertise in all of these things, as well as in methodology and statistical analysis. Our new unit will offer this expertise to researchers around the College who want to run clinical trials. We are very excited to launch the ICTU and we look forward to creating a world-class unit that will benefit patients across the world.”
There are already several key clinical trials running within the ICTU, including multiple follow-on studies from the Anglo-Scandinavian Cardiac Outcomes Trial (ASCOT), which has previously produced results that show combining certain blood pressure lowering drugs with cholesterol reducing drugs in patients with moderate cardiac risk can reduce heart attacks by half.
Professor Neil Poulter, Co-Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit, from the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial College London, added: “We will be running trials in all areas of health and disease, with particular emphasis on areas of major concern to global health. Clinical trials are such a vital part of improving treatments and healthcare practices – they are the gold standard of research and can give us definitive proof of whether a treatment can help patients. We hope the ICTU will help bring together all the outstanding trials undertaken at Imperial.”
The ICTU was launched by Professor Dame Sally Davies, Director General of Research and Development and Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department of Health and NHS.
The unit will operate as part of Imperial’s Academic Health Science Centre, the unique partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust that formed in October 2007 The AHSC's aim is to improve the quality of life of patients and populations by taking new discoveries and translating them into new therapies as quickly as possible.
The ICTU incorporates the International Centre for Circulatory Health Trials Unit and the Clinical Trial and Evaluation Unit at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. It will also work with Imperial’s other partner NHS Trusts.
The Unit has recently been granted a provisional registration by the UK Clinical Research Collaboration Clinical Trials Unit Registration Process, which is designed to help improve the quality of available expertise to carry out clinical trials in the UK.
The ICTU wants to hear from researchers from Imperial College London and clinicians from affiliated trusts who are interested in doing clinical trials. Please visit the ICTU website to find out more and to contact the team.
In the video above, you can watch Professor Deborah Ashby and Professor Neil Poulter, Co-Directors of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit, talking about what the Unit will do and why clinical trials are important.
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For further information please contact:
Lucy Goodchild
Press Officer
Imperial College London
E-mail: lucy.goodchild@imperial.ac.uk
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