Centre for Experimental Cancer Medicine
About the Centre for Experimental Cancer Medicine
The Centre for Experimental Cancer Medicine (CECM) is part of the Barts ECMC. The team comprises of an academically led Trials Team responsible for the development and management of investigator led and academically sponsored clinical trials, as well as a Cancer Research Delivery Group (CRDG) responsible for the recruitment and clinical management of Barts Health NHS Trust patients participating in clinical trials.
The Centre’s vision and strategic priorities include:
- Facilitating the transfer from preclinical research undertaken at Barts into the clinic
- Using biomarker driven strategies to better understand the biology of novel treatments thus expanding our programme of translational research
- Developing a programme of rational combinations of immunotherapy
Barts is an immunotherapy Centre of Research Excellence (imCORE centre) and part of a global network of basic and clinical scientists from 26 leading academic research institutions in cancer immunotherapy who work together to accelerate the characterisation of complex biology and drive novel immunotherapy combination strategies to identify ways for more patients to benefit from immunotherapy. Prof P. Schmid and Prof T. Powles are the scientific leads of the Barts imCORE centre and Dr P. Hall is the Barts Site Alliance Manager.
Trials Team
The Trials Team provides a robust infrastructure to support investigators with clinical trial conduct. Proposals are developed from an initial idea, through funding application, trial initiation and set-up, to trial completion and data analysis. Our team specialises in early phase trials (Ib/IIa), using biomarker driven designs with strong expertise in immunotherapy.
The team currently supports a broad portfolio of clinical research that includes a range of modalities and disease sites. The portfolio includes 30 early phase clinical trials with a focus in breast and urological cancers as well as cancers of unmet need such as lung and pancreatic cancer. The portfolio is balanced across early and metastatic settings.
Our trials are being conducted in over 120 hospitals in the UK, USA, Europe and Asia. In the last 5 years alone the CTU has developed 19 investigator-led and sponsored early phase trials with a budget of over £25M. Most trials have an extensive associated translational research programme with a specific focus on circulating biomarkers.
More information about our clinical trial portfolio can be found on the clinical trials pages.
If you have an idea for a trial that you would like to develop with our Trials Team, please contact the team at BartsECMC@qmul.ac.uk prior to the funding application being submitted.
Clinical Research Delivery Group (CRDG)
The CRDG is predominantly based at St Bartholomew’s Hospital and is responsible for offering more than 200 oncology clinical trials to Barts Health NHS patients across all tumour groups, with strong expertise in immunotherapy in both solid oncology as well as haemato-oncology.
Image credit: Lung cancer cells. Anne Weston, Francis Crick Institute. CC BY-NC