Oxford wins funding for leukaemia research nurse
19/07/2019
This article is more than four years old.
Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust is one of 12 centres across the UK that will receive funding to recruit a specialist leukaemia research nurse for three years.
The funding was announced by the charity Cure Leukaemia, which is establishing a Trials Acceleration Programme (TAP) Network, which consists of a central hub in Birmingham and an integrated research nurse network that works together to accelerate the design and delivery of clinical trials.
The 12 successful centres will receive £50,000 per year to fund the recruitment of a dedicated specialist research nurse for the three-year period from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2022. The nurse will work closely with the TAP Hub at the University of Birmingham to deliver practice that informs trials in blood cancer.
The OUH nurse will be based at the Churchill Hospital.
"We are delighted to have been awarded this funding and to be awarded the status of a TAP Centre," said Prof Paresh Vyas, Director of the Oxford Centre for Haematology. "This is a wonderful community-inspired fundraising effort to put research nurses into hospitals – a practical solution to ensure the best for NHS patients.
"This will provide funding for a research nurse, which will enable patients to have access to the very latest in blood cancer treatment. It also allows the major centres to work collaboratively to access the best drugs in the world."
Blood cancer remains the third biggest cancer killer in the UK, with approximately 38,000 people diagnosed and 14,000 losing their lives to the disease every year. The funding will not only give blood cancer patients that have exhausted standard treatments for the disease hope through recruitment to pioneering new clinical trials, but also help continue global progress towards finding effective treatments for all forms of blood cancer.
Cure Leukaemia brings pioneering drug and transplant treatments to blood cancer patients. To date, it has helped to treat more than 4,000 patients by leveraging over £25m worth of revolutionary drugs and funding crucial research nurses to administer these trials.
The formation of the new network, which builds on the existing TAP programme funded by the charity Bloodwise, has been largely thanks to funding worth up to £2.5m from Deutsche Bank, which chose Cure Leukaemia as one of its charities of the year for 2018 and 2019.