How can the UK remain at the forefront of discovering and developing new medicines?

The Academy and ABPI today published a meeting report on 'Bridging the preclinical-clinical boundary’. This meeting looked at better ways to integrate across this boundary to accelerate the translation of research into health benefits.

On 9 March 2018, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry held a workshop to examine how the UK can better bridge the preclinical-clinical boundary (that is, the point at which preclinical evidence is considered sufficient to merit a move to first-in-human studies). The meeting looked to identify challenges to, and gaps in the two-way exchange of evidence across the boundary, as well as the opportunities for greater integration of preclinical and clinical science.

Several areas were identified as key to improving the translation of research in the UK, including:

  • The need to embed a ‘team science’ approach of interdisciplinary, cross-sector working to reflect the breadth of skills and disciplines required for translational research. This needs to consider incentives and how success is rewarded, especially in cross-sector teams, as well as re-thinking career pathways. Open innovation and pre-competitive collaborations can promote this team science approach.
  • Identifying emerging and future skills gaps and proactively addressing them. Those identified include statistics, clinical pharmacology and pharmaceutical science.
  • The need to better understand and recognise, and in some cases overcome, the cultural differences across sectors to maximise collaborative opportunities. This could be supported through increasing permeability of workforce across sectors.
  • Instilling a research culture into clinical training and the NHS.
  • The potential value of new preclinical and experimental medicine models for de-risking discovery projects or accelerating translation.
  • Making the most of the UK’s existing research infrastructure by maximising access and signposting research sponsors to the right expertise or tools.

The report of this workshop has now been published and can be found on the right hand side of this page. To find out more about this event, please contact the FORUM team at forum@acmedsci.ac.uk.

 

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