Twelve medical institutions in the UK and Ireland are to share an £84m (€121m; $155m) award to boost clinical research facilities over the next five years.
The award, the largest of its type, comes from a consortium of research funders led by the Wellcome Trust, and will help make the United Kingdom a world leader in clinical research, says the trust’s director Mark Walport.
The money will go to developing existing clinical research facilities and setting up new ones. The facilities would give the UK a greatly enhanced capacity to do first class research in key areas including ageing, stroke, cancer, mental health, and the metabolic syndrome, said Dr Walport.
The 12 centres to benefit are Dublin; Belfast; Oxford; Cambridge; Newcastle; Birmingham; Edinburgh; Manchester; the Institute of Cancer Research; Imperial College, London; King’s College, London, and University College London.
Dr Walport explained that the new awards would build on the success of the first five clinical research facilities launched in 1997. “They were the catalyst for developing new clinical research investigations in very high quality environments.”
Experimental medicine was increasingly important in making advances in health care and top class facilities were fundamental to achieving that. “What facilities provide is the infrastructure for that research, including new investigation methods and new diagnostics.”
Paul Stewart, professor of medicine and director of Birmingham University’s clinical research facility, said that 23 000 patients had already been seen in the facility, which had also generated about 100 patient based studies.
The new funding would help them expand their gene therapy programme at the facility, develop a satellite facility at the nearby children’s hospital, and pay for about 20 research nurses. “There is no way you could perform true transactional research without this [funding],” he said.
The new investment is the result of a competition announced last year by the Wellcome Trust. An international scientific advisory committee consisting of leading clinical academics from the United States and the UK considered a total of 27 proposals before reaching its decision.
The biggest funders will be the Wellcome Trust and the Wolfson Foundation, which are providing £30m; the health department in England, which is giving more than £25m; and the Medical Research Council, which will contribute up to £8m, principally to fund new 3 Tesla whole body magnetic resonance imaging scanners.
The awards form part of a wider initiative to boost experimental medicine in the UK, including a £35m grant for a network of experimental cancer medicine centres and a Medical Research Council programme for experimental medicine research. Earlier this year the government announced a new research strategy and pledged to spend £650m a year on patient based research and development.
Edward Holmes, vice chancellor of health sciences at the University of California and chairman of the adjudicating committee, said that the collaboration between the different funding bodies had been unique: “There is something really interesting and exciting happening in clinical research in the UK at the moment.”
