Health

09 Sep 09

A medical research collaboration between the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) at Oxford University and Fuwai Hospital in Beijing – the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences’ leading heart centre – is to be renewed and extended.

The new agreement will see the establishment of dedicated core facilities at Fuwai Hospital and a training program for Chinese researchers to support large-scale collaborative research. It will significantly expand CTSU’s research capacity in China and secure its future for the next 20 years, as well as further the collaboration between the two institutions that stretches back to the 1980s.

‘Such collaborations are absolutely necessary to carry out large-scale randomised trials involving many thousands of patients and get reliable, high-quality data,’ says Professor Zhengming Chen, director of CTSU’s China Programme. ‘We are delighted that we’ll now be able to expand our collaboration with Fuwai Hospital. The new agreement is important in facilitating future research into the prevention and treatment of the world’s biggest killers such as heart disease and stroke.

‘China is a tremendous place for such research, with its huge population and well-established healthcare infrastructure offering the ability to carry out high-quality studies cost effectively with many hundreds of hospitals throughout China.’

A new memorandum of understanding between Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences will be signed in a ceremony today in Beijing attended by the Chinese health minister, Professor Zhu Chen, and Oxford University’s Vice-Chancellor elect, Professor Andrew Hamilton.

Members of many other collaborative institutions – the China National Centre for Disease Control, hospitals from different regions, Merck, as well as senior officials from the State Food and Drug Administration, the Chinese Ministries of Health and of Science and Technology, and major universities in Beijing – will also attend the ceremony.

Storage of drugs for clinical trials at the joint research centre at Fuwai Hospital.

CTSU is an internationally renowned centre for conducting large-scale epidemiological studies and randomised trials into the prevention and treatment of common chronic diseases such as heart attacks, stroke and cancer.

Since the early 1980s, it has carried out many collaborative studies in public health and clinical medicine with scientists from the China National Centre for Disease Control and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. These are by far Oxford University’s largest collaborations with China.

In 2004, a joint centre – the Fuwai-Oxford Collaborative Centre for Cardiovascular Health – was established between CTSU and Fuwai Hospital. At present, there are more than 30 full-time staff in Beijing working on a number of CTSU-coordinated randomised trials in the cardiovascular area. Around 20 researchers a year also come to CTSU in Oxford for a ten-day training course in advanced research methodologies.

The name of the centre will now change to the China Oxford Centre for International Health Research, reflecting a new research agenda that will go beyond cardiovascular disease into other major health issues. With new core funding and new research projects planned, the number of staff is also expected to expand further.

'CTSU and Fuwai have collaborated in the past on a number of large randomised trials, such as the Chinese Cardiac Studies and the Chinese Acute Stroke Trial, which resulted in changes to clinical guidelines worldwide in emergency care after heart attacks and stroke. The main results from these collaborative studies have probably already helped save many tens of thousands of lives worldwide,’ says Professor Chen, who will be co-director of the renamed centre.

‘We all expect that the joint research centre under its new name, the China Oxford Centre for International Health Research, will continue to deliver new results that are needed for evidence-based medicine in China and worldwide.’