Birmingham Health Partners (BHP) has considerable experience in the design and delivery of clinical trials, with Birmingham now one of Europe’s largest clusters in this field. These trials are supported by our access to the West Midlands population of 5.4million, made up of a highly diverse socio-economic mix.
This activity is built upon significant infrastructure which BHP has put in place including:
The Birmingham Clinical Trials Unit (BCTU) collaborates with a large number of clinical investigators at a local, national and international level. It currently employs over 100 staff and coordinates over 50 studies in primary and secondary care, across a wide spectrum of clinical conditions and in diverse populations. BCTU is also a partner in the Birmingham Surgical Trials Consortium (BiSTC), one of five national surgical clinical trials units supported by the Royal College of Surgeons. This unit receives National Institute for Health Research CTU Support Funding and is a UKCRN registered trials unit.
Cancer Research UK Clinical Trials Unit (CRCTU) specialises in the design, conduct and analysis of phase I to IV cancer clinical trials for investigators nationwide and internationally in a number of specialist areas. A number of specialist groups reside at CRCTU including the CR-UK Children’s Cancer Trials Team (CCTT) which designs, coordinates and runs national paediatric trials. The unit was established over 30 years ago and is one of the UK’s largest cancer trials units which have run over 600 trials. It receives core funding from Cancer Research UK, was one of the first NCRI accredited units and is a UKCRN registered trials unit.
Building on Birmingham’s existing leadership in clinical trials, a Diagnostics, Drugs, Devices and Biomarkers clinical trials team (D3B) has been established in the Institute of Translational Medicine and is focusing on the design of early phase trials and experimental medicine studies. D3B ensures the sharing of best practice and innovation for the provision into this specialist area of clinical trials design along with development expertise and regulatory knowledge.
The Birmingham Wellcome Trust/NIHR Clinical Research Facility (CRF) secured the largest UK award for a CRF and provides a platform to support our experimental studies. The CRF comprises adult and paediatric facilities based at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Birmingham Children’s Hospital. The facility provides high-quality clinical environments where patients can take part in experimental and complex clinical research studies. The CRF works adjacent to our Advanced Therapies Facility (ATF), which is formed of a Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) unit and a Human Biomaterials Resource Centre (HBRC). The HBRC is vital for biological samples taken during our studies and allows us to collect and store tissue ethically due to their overarching ethics.
This infrastructure is underpinned by a clinical informatics platform which enables highly characterised patient cohort data collection across bioinformatics (e.g. genetics, phenotyping, metabolomics), clinical informatics (e.g. diagnostic categories, co-morbidities, social phenotyping, haematology, biochemistry, drug treatments) health informatics (e.g. patient outcomes, patient reported outcome measures) and IT platforms that enable patient data-sharing across NHS organisations, this is led academically from the University’s Centre for Computational Biology. In addition to this the Centre for Patient Reported Outcomes, the Surgical Reconstruction and Microbiology Research Centre (SRMRC), the Trauma Management Healthcare Technology Cooperative (HTC) and the Centre for Rare Diseases (CfRD) provide a broad range of research expertise that is housed with the institute.
