Cambridge's Experimental Medicine Initiative, working with AstraZeneca and GSK, is training specialists who can work out at an earlier stage of clinical trials if a treatment is likely to succeed.
UK researchers are launching a clinical trial to investigate if the drug niclosamide, usually used to treat tapeworms, can prevent COVID-19 infection in vulnerable, high risk kidney patients and reduce the number of people who become seriously ill or die from it.
The COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest global healthcare crisis of our generation, presenting enormous challenges to medical research, including clinical trials. Advances in machine learning are providing an opportunity to adapt clinical trials and lay the groundwork for smarter, faster and more flexible clinical trials in the future.
A ‘pill on a string’ test can identify ten times more people with Barrett’s oesophagus than the usual GP route, after results from a 3-year trial were published in the medical journal The Lancet.
When a drug fails late on in clinical trials it’s a major setback for launching new medicines. It can cost millions, even billions, of research and development funds. Now, an ‘adaptive’ approach to clinical trials and a genetic tool for predicting success are increasing the odds of picking a winner.
The success of a clinical trial hinges on its ability to recruit enough patients. Dr Frank Waldron-Lynch from the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research explains how the use of the internet to directly contact patients with type 1 diabetes greatly accelerated the recruitment leading to the early completion of his team’s study of a potential new treatment for type 1 diabetes.
A new therapy for peanut allergy has been successful in the majority of the 99 children who took part in a clinical trial.
Discovery could lead to new treatments for this genetic disorder.
New treatment could reduce insulin injections to just once or twice a week.
A multi-disciplinary centre of excellence which aims to bring cutting-edge pancreatic research from the bench to the bedside is launched.
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