In 2024, we celebrated 25 years of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit at UCL. To mark this historic anniversary, we produced the '25 at 25' series of articles, highlighting 25 major achievements throughout the Unit’s 25-year history.
Our pioneering work on the MAMS design has improved the speed and efficiency of clinical trials worldwide.
Millions of people with HIV are now living longer, healthier lives thanks to the SMART, START and CHER trials.
To improve screening approaches and pick up ovarian cancer earlier, we ran the UK Collaborative Trial of Ovarian Cancer Screening or UKCTOCS trial.
We developed the PRACTical design to allow researchers to compare multiple treatments for diseases without a single “standard-of-care” treatment that every patient could take.
Cancer treatment can be tough. But our clinical trials have helped make treatment easier for patients and less costly to healthcare systems.
Our clinical trials have helped deliver shorter treatment regimens for tuberculosis (TB), improving quality of life for the millions of people around the world who fall ill with TB every year.
Our IPD meta-analyses have influenced the treatment of patients across a broad range of conditions, and pushed forward the science of meta-analysis.
We have been at the forefront of conducting HIV treatment trials in children, expanding the options available to them, and making treatments easier to take and tolerate.
Our OE02 and MAGIC (ST02) trials transformed treatment for gastroesophageal cancer with the addition of chemotherapy to the standard-of-care.
We co-founded the national ACORD collaboration, marking the beginning of a new era for clinical trials in neurodegenerative diseases and offering new hope to people affected by these conditions.
To encourage the wider research community to implement our new methods, we make statistical code openly available to use in software packages like Stata and R.
For almost two decades, we have been committed to actively involving patients and the public in all our clinical trials and studies.
We work to improve trial monitoring and develop resources that help other researchers take a more structured approach to monitoring activities.
Together, the DART and ARROW trials and Lablite project showed that antiretroviral therapy can safely be used without routine laboratory monitoring, facilitating the roll-out in low-resource settings.
More than a million children fall ill with tuberculosis each year around the world. Yet few trials are conducted to inform treatment for these children. The SHINE trial addressed this evidence gap.
OCTOPUS is the first ever multi-arm multi-stage clinical trial in multiple sclerosis (MS), aiming to transform the way that new treatments for MS are tested.
We enhance the skills of trial teams we work with across the globe, so they can deliver their own sustainable, successful and impactful clinical trials.
Over the last 18 years, we have been running one of the largest ever trials in prostate cancer. With 12,000 participants STAMPEDE has tested 10 different treatments and changed the standard-of-care for prostate cancer four times.
Over the last 50 years, ovarian cancer survival has almost doubled in the UK. Our trials have played an important role in improving treatment options.
People starting HIV treatment with advanced disease have a high risk of dying within the first few weeks of treatment. The REALITY trial found a way to prevent deaths among these patients.
Most systematic reviews are planned retrospectively, once most eligible trials have completed and reported their results. We pioneered the FAME approach to reduce bias, increase timeliness and provide more thorough results.
The PROMIS study changed how prostate cancer is diagnosed, sparing thousands of men unnecessary biopsies.
The ROCI design helps researchers avoid choosing arbitrary treatment options in trials, instead exploring several options to identify which one is best.
The PROUD study showed that a daily pill could play a major role in reducing the number of new HIV infections among men who have sex with men.
Our trials have found new uses for existing drugs, leading to remarkable improvements for patients, often at a fraction of the cost of new drugs.
Contents
The multi-arm multi-stage design
Saving lives with early HIV treatment
Ovarian cancer screening: the UKCTOCS trial
Optimising treatments for people with cancer
Shortening treatment for tuberculosis
Individual participant data meta-analysis
Improving treatment options for children living with HIV
Transforming treatment for gastroesophageal cancer
The ACORD collaboration for multi-arm multi-stage trials in neurodegenerative diseases
Software to help people implement our methods
Patient and Public Involvement
Improving clinical trial monitoring
Making HIV treatment accessible to people living in sub-Saharan Africa
OCTOPUS - speeding up new treatments for progressive MS
Training and capacity strengthening
Transforming prostate cancer treatment through the STAMPEDE clinical trial
Defining treatment for ovarian cancer
Reducing deaths among people starting HIV treatment with advanced disease
Framework for Adaptive Meta-analysis (FAME) for timely, reliable and thorough results
Improving prostate cancer diagnosis
Optimising treatments using the ROCI design