In order to increase the number of UK brain tumour patients having access to clinical trials the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) has looked to strengthen the relationship between clinical trial developers and delivery partners in order to identify and remove barriers to progress.
Historic underfunding of research into brain tumours has resulted in a low number of patients being able to take part in clinical trials. Funding has increased, with charities such as Brain Tumour Research playing a part in encouraging awareness as well as generating funds. So too has the number of clinical trials increased, but with many being targeted at very specific groups of brain tumour patients the number of individuals taking part has remained static.
Targeting the right research
The NIHR identified major blockers to more brain tumour research including a lack of expertise in some areas and a lack of early career clinicians choosing to pursue research in such a poorly funded type of cancer, resulting in not enough strong principal investigators coming through the system.
Partners such as Richmond Pharmacology who can design adaptive phase 1 studies are keen to reduce the impact of barriers such as lack of funding by ensuring cost and time effective methods are employed.
Increasing collaboration
With a high number of clinical trials being conducted in a single centre, this limited the number of patients who could potentially benefit from being able to take part. The NIHR wants to encourage better levels of collaboration between centres so that they can share trials and experience between those who have been longer established and those new centres that have more recently been able to engage thanks to increased funding.
Funding for new roles that could benefit the transfer of knowledge between centres is essential, according to Dr Matthew Williams, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Imperial College London who says that funding one role, such as a member of staff to be present in an operating theatre to take brain tumour samples as a neurosurgeon operates could be a way to unlock many more samples being processed by research teams and open possibilities for new research and new clinical trials. Since funding has increased the focus needs to be on bringing the right clinicians into the field of brain tumour research.
