Groundbreaking £50m MRC Centre will overhaul clinical trials for patients
18 Dec 2025
MRC Press Release 18 December 2025
A new initiative aims to accelerate the trial of new medicines for improved patient care.
The Medical Research Council Centre of Research Excellence in Clinical Trial Innovation in partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Research will receive up to £50 million over 14 years with the ambition of transforming the clinical trial landscape.
The centre plans to shake-up approaches to clinical trial design and delivery by developing pioneering new ways to speed up the process and drive improvements in treatment and recovery.
Science Minister Lord Patrick Vallance said:
"Clinical trials are vital for turning promising research into real treatments, but they often take a long time.
“By investing £50 million in this new centre, we’re helping to speed up the process so patients can access life-changing medicines sooner, with a process that is as rigorous.
“Bringing forward more effective and targeted treatments will also ease pressure on the NHS, helping to improve care for people across the country."
One of the Centre’s key areas of focus will be to transform the move away from the current approach of testing a single intervention in a single disease one at a time. Developing new efficient ways to test multiple drugs in multiple diseases simultaneously could be a game changer both for industry and the academic community.
Another significant area of focus is using clinical trials to identify minimum ‘intensity’ such as duration, frequency, or dose required for a drug to be effective. For instance, finding the lowest effective dose of a chemotherapy drug could help make cancer treatment gentler for patients by reducing side effects.
Professor Patrick Chinnery, Medical Research Council Executive Chair explained:
“The UK medical research community is very effective at gaining insights about disease biology and developing potential new treatments and interventions.
“It is essential to quickly move such interventions forward to the right patients, at the right doses, durations and combinations. The MRC is delighted to be supporting this new methodology-focused CoRE towards faster patient impact of our research, especially with their plans to address underserved areas such as multiple long-term conditions and rare diseases.”
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health and Social Care and Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR, said:
“The Centre of Excellence is potentially game-changing for our population and we are proud to partner with the MRC and researchers at UCL to support this.
“This is yet another example of the UK leading on innovation in trial design, speeding up the delivery of clinical trials and accelerating the use of targeted, effective treatments and technologies to patients through research. The potential benefits are truly exciting."
Led by Professor Max Parmar, the MRC CoRE will build on the pioneering work of the MRC Clinical Trials Unit, which developed the highly innovative ‘multi-arm multi-stage’ platform clinical trials. These designs have revolutionised clinical trials to be more flexible, able to add or remove new drugs for testing over time, depending on results and new breakthroughs.
Professor Parmar said: “Basic science is rapidly producing more understanding of biology and consequently many new interventions to help us in a range of diseases – both by industry and academic routes.
“Clinical trials are the way in which we evaluate all these new treatments. However, they are too slow and costly meaning it takes some 20 years to get a new invention from the laboratory into routine clinical practice at great expense.
“Our goal with this CoRE is to substantially reduce this time so that patients can benefit much sooner from new treatments and also bring the costs of testing new treatments down.
“We plan for this to act as a hub for ground-breaking developments in clinical trial methodology.”
To ensure widespread adoption the CoRE will work with collaborators from more than 60 organisations worldwide, including researchers, doctors, statisticians, drug companies and regulatory bodies both to develop and implement these new trial designs.
The leadership group will include researchers from the University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, University of Cambridge, University of Edinburgh, University of Birmingham, and Newcastle University.
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