Delivering more research into new drugs
Barts Health is to host a new clinical research centre that will give patients across north east London quicker access to cutting-edge treatments and clinical trials.
We are one of 14 hubs in England designated as a Commercial Research Delivery Centre (CRDC), along with two other sites in London.
The announcement by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) comes with £4.75m to invest in staff over seven years from April 2025, in collaboration with local academic and health partners.
The network is designed to enhance the speed and efficiency of commercial clinical trials. Hubs will work with industry to support the UK’s status as one of the best places for innovative companies to do research.
Barts Health consistently recruits more participants to commercial clinical trials of new drugs than any other trust and is already hosting the north London research delivery network for NIHR studies.
For this latest initiative we are buddying with Queen Mary University of London to help increase commercial research activity and reduce commercial trial set-up times.
A central study set-up team of three based at Barts Health will work with eight others based in our partner trusts at Homerton Healthcare and Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT).
The expansion comes as our existing clinical research facility (CRF) on the 11th floor of The Royal London is poised to move next year into new state-of-the-art premises on the 15th floor, funded by Barts Charity.
With five times more space and embedded pharmacy and governance teams, this will create an unrivalled research centre of excellence for our local community.
Dr Kieran McCafferty, director of the CRF and health and care director of the NIHR north London delivery network, said: “We are ambitious to grow our commercial trial activity to place research at the heart of patient care and address health inequalities across our communities.
“Ethnically diverse people are generally poorly represented in clinical trials, but with over half our population of Black, Asian or mixed ethnicity we are well-placed to increase the diversity of people recruited into commercial research and improve equity in access.”