Our Mission: "...To facilitate the translation of scientific Discovery into tomorrow’s medicines for the benefit of all cancer sufferers ..."

History

Improving the quality of cancer care throughout the world is essential to improve cancer survival rates. High quality research, to better understand the disease process involved and to find more effective treatments, will make an important contribution to this goal.

ClinOx has developed out of two organisations based in the Department of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of Oxford: the National Translational Cancer Research Network (NTRAC) and the Oncology Clinical Trials Office (OCTO).

NTRAC, led by Prof David Kerr, was funded by the UK government for a five year period (2001-2006). Its aim was to meet the needs of industry by fast-tracking high quality, cost effective early phase oncology clinical trials, through centrally co-ordinated access, to a network of the UK’s leading cancer researchers and comprehensive cancer centres. NTRAC was very successful and its accomplishments included:

  • The initiation of 10 early phase clinical trials which recruited approximately 300 patients from 12 UK centres in 24 months, involving novel signal transduction inhibitors, spindle poisons, receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitors, DNA repair blockers and innovative cytotoxic drugs;
  • Negotiation of 31 trial site contracts on behalf of five global pharma companies; and
  • Site selection feasibility studies for a further 6 protocols.

The only gap in NTRAC’s armamentarium was that it was unable to provide monitoring capacity, and thus sponsors had to provide this for each of their trials. ClinOx has remedied this, and will provide full trial management and monitoring capacity for their clients. In addition, while NTRAC only worked with UK cancer centres, ClinOx will work with the best comprehensive cancer centres around the world.

OCTO is a Phase III oncology clinical trials office that is directed by Prof David Kerr, with Ms. Justine Smith as Trial Management Director. The aim of OCTO is to run high-quality randomised controlled phase III trials looking at effective cancer therapies, particularly in the field of gastrointestinal cancer. To this end, it is currently running 4 large phase III studies and has randomised 10,000 patients over the past decade. It has a staff of 30, including clinical trial coordinators, clinical trial administrators, clinical trial support officers, clinical trial monitors, a QA administrator and an IT team. Consequently, OCTO can provide the following services: safety reviews, randomisation service, data entry, database design and maintenance, QA, site monitoring, trial management, drug supply monitoring and management, trial funding advice and management, clinical research training, regulatory and EC reporting and trial document design (including protocol writing).

ClinOx is built on the successes of NTRAC and OCTO. It has the necessary expertise in trial design, negotiation & placement, acquired through running NTRAC, and has access to all the necessary trial management, monitoring and regulatory expertise through OCTO.