Imperial: new clinical trials unit launched

Imperial College London has opened a new Clinical Trials Unit to build on the existing trials being carried out at the college and create a centre of excellence for clinical trials of treatments for conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer and mental health problems.

The new unit 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.

Deborah Ashby, Co-Director of the Imperial Clinical Trials Unit, from the School of Public Health, 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 requires expertise in all of these areas, 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,” Ashby said.

Neil Poulter, also a Co-Director from the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial, said, “We will be running trials in all areas of health and disease, with particular emphasis on areas of major concern to global health.”

The new unit was launched by Sally Davies, Director General of Research and Development and Chief Scientific Adviser for the Department of Health and the UK National Health Service.

The unit, which will operate as part of Imperial’s Academic Health Science Centre, 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 was recently 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.