The University of Aberdeen has been awarded £845,000 to lead a Scotland-wide network of health professionals and research experts who will conduct key health trials.
Aberdeen and its partners the Universities of Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow are sharing a £1.2m Strategic Research Development Grant from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council to create a Scottish Collaboration of Triallists (SCoT).
The four-year funding will support excellence and build capacity for multi-centre randomised controlled trials (RCTs) of healthcare interventions led from Scotland.
The first component of the SCoT project is the creation of a collaboration of experienced triallists from clinical trials units at the four Scottish universities.
They will deliver a range of workplans to improve expertise, efficiency and capacity to mount landmark trials which address important health issues. These workplans will focus on harnessing new technologies to increase quality and efficiency of trials; improving recruitment and retention in trials, and providing Scottish training in these types of trials.
The second component of SCoT will enhance the existing clinical trials facility at the University of Aberdeen - the Centre for Healthcare Randomised Trials or CHaRT - to meet the demand for trials infrastructure from groups of clinicians who wish to evaluate an aspect of the health care.
John Norrie, Director of CHaRT, Professor Adrian Grant, Director of the University of Aberdeen’s Health Services Research Unit (HSRU), and Professor Marion Campbell, Deputy Director of HSRU are the co-leaders of SCoT, which will be led from Aberdeen.
Professor Grant said: “We are very excited by the award of this funding. Although Scotland has an enviable record in leading major international clinical trials, in particular from Aberdeen, trials expertise is currently concentrated on certain types of health problems especially cardiovascular, including stroke, primary care, and non-drug technologies.
“Scotland is much more likely to continue to be successful in leading trials if its trials groups work together, sharing expertise and experience – SCoT gives us a golden opportunity to do this.”
Mr Norrie said: “Clinical research is changing, so much so that now many questions can now only be addressed through multi-centre collaboration, mediated through clinical networks – this is the philosophy behind the UK Clinical Research Collaboration.
“Clinical trials units such as the University of Aberdeen’s CHaRT will support the trials sponsored by these networks, and this funding will be crucial to allow CHaRT to expand its capacity to meet this demand, in particular from clinical networks with limited trial infrastructure support”.
Prof Campbell added: “We expect that within the four years of the grant, the Collaboration of Scottish Triallists will have developed into a national resource, and an enhanced CHaRT will be operating at full capacity.
“A national approach to problem solving within randomised clinical trials, coupled with integrated joint working will provide the confidence, momentum and commitment for further collaboration, which will ensure that Scotland remains competitive in leading international standard trials.”
* The Scottish university partners comprise the Health Informatics Consortium (Professor Frank Sullivan, University of Dundee): the Neurosciences Trials Unit (Professor Peter Sandercock, University of Edinburgh), and the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics (Professor Ian Ford, University of Glasgow) and the Clinical Trials Unit (Dr Allan Gaw, University of Glasgow).
** The UK Clinical Research Collaboration is a new partnership of major organisations united by the shared aim of establishing the position of the UK as a world leader in clinical research by harnessing the power of the NHS. See www.ukcrc.org for further details.