Bench to bedside

Oxford enjoys a strong research tradition both in local hospital and Health care trusts and the University’s clinical medical departments. Where there are effective links between the two, patients can often benefit from new treatments at an early stage, while young clinicians and researchers learn to exploit new knowledge as it becomes available. In December 2006 the Department of Health’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) recognised the extent and excellence of this tradition by establishing a ‘comprehensive’ Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Oxford. Four other comprehensive centres were established in the UK at the same time, together with a further six specialist centres. Each has been given substantial funding over five years to ‘translate fundamental biomedical research into clinical research that benefits patients’. 

The goal of NIHR, as part of the government’s strategy ‘Best research for best health’, is to make the National Health Service a centre for research focused on improving the care that patients receive. Oxford’s successful application, the work of many individuals across the University and the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals Trust, could bring in as much as £100 million over five years in capital, training posts and other resources. The Director of the BRC, Professor Alastair Buchan, is a passionate believer in the idea that training, research and the delivery of healthcare all depend on one another. ‘The fundamental principle of the BRC is to connect different scientific disciplines, healthcare professionals and patients to advance medical research and healthcare delivery’, he says. ‘You can come up with solutions in the lab that don’t translate into treatments, or you can get answers from large-scale clinical trials that don’t work in particular individuals. What the BRC is about is conducting proof-of-principle studies in humans, in a hospital setting, taking what we can from the science and conducting research that will help us to avoid using clever interventions that benefit very few.’

Professor Buchan heads Oxford’s Acute Stroke Programme, which brings together researchers and clinicians to tackle one of the UK’s most common causes of death and serious disability. Oxford research, which emphasises that stroke patients need to be treated as fast as possible, has helped to win funds from the UK Clinical Research Collaboration for an Acute Vascular Imaging Centre (AVIC), which will open in 2008 next to the John Radcliffe’s emergency department. The AVIC will both provide patients with a fast assessment of the brain damage caused by their stroke and host research into new techniques of image capture and analysis.