A fresh £50 million program is set to reduce the duration novel medications remain in clinical trials, allowing patients to access new therapies much earlier.
The Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence in Clinical Trial Innovation (MRC CoRE CTI) in the UK, established in collaboration with the National Institute for Health and Care Research, will allocate £50 million over 14 years with the goal of revolutionizing the clinical trial environment. The leadership team for MRC CoRE comprises 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.
This centre will expand upon the initiatives of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, which pioneered the ‘multi-arm multi-stage’ (MAMS) trial design. In contrast to conventional designs, MAMS permits researchers to evaluate multiple treatment arms simultaneously and enables them to discard treatments lacking potential while incorporating new ones as they arise.
The MAMS design has already been utilized in over 80 published studies and offers numerous benefits, such as expediting the testing of new therapies and lowering expenses, as it eliminates the necessity to initiate a new trial for each emerging treatment.
The forthcoming MRC CoRE CTI intends to innovate methods for clinical trial design and execution by creating groundbreaking strategies to accelerate processes and enhance treatment and recovery outcomes. It will provide a range of projects, including MAMS, non-inferiority trials that assess whether a treatment is only slightly superior to the existing best, and personalized randomized controlled trials.
‘Clinical trials are essential for converting promising research into actual treatments, but they frequently require extensive time,’ noted science minister Patrick Vallance in a statement released on 18 December. ‘By investing £50 million in this new centre, we’re facilitating a quicker process so that patients can access life-altering medicines sooner, with a procedure that remains thorough.’
One primary focus of the centre will be to shift from the current method of evaluating a single intervention for a specific disease at a time to adopting new, effective strategies to test multiple drugs across various diseases simultaneously.
Another critical area of emphasis is utilizing clinical trials to ascertain the minimum ‘intensity’ for medications, which refers to the least duration, frequency, or dose necessary for a drug to be effective. This strategy could assist in making some treatments, like chemotherapy, less burdensome for patients by minimizing side effects.