MICA: The North West England MRC Fellowship Scheme in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics

Clinical pharmacologists are physicians and scientists whose focus is developing and understanding existing and new drug therapies; they work in a variety of settings in academia, the NHS, industry and government. In the clinical setting, they work directly with patients, participate in trials, and investigate how patients respond to drugs, including why certain patients develop side effects to drugs. The total number of academic clinical pharmacologists trained in the UK is small, and there is an imperative to continue to train more clinical pharmacologists and other specialists with expertise in clinical pharmacology who can work between academia, healthcare and industry. In 2010, the Government recognised that the provision of high quality-care and better interaction with Industry requires clinicians to be familiar with the relevant practices in clinical pharmacology. The universities of Liverpool and Manchester, in collaboration with industry partners, were awarded funding from the MRC to address this unmet need in clinical pharmacology: The North West England MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowship Programme in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics. This programme has allowed 13 clinical fellows (high flying trainee doctors), rigorously selected from across all medical specialties e.g. dermatology, rheumatology, paediatrics etc., to study for PhDs on a variety of clinical pharmacology related research topics such as drug safety and stratified medicine - matching the right drug to the right patient. In addition to their research work the fellows received without walls training with industry and modular training in key aspects of clinical pharmacology. The programme has been a tremendous success with 56 scientific journal publications, 21 conference presentations, 13 prizes and interactions with 61 NHS Trusts. All fellows will also get a PhD. We now wish to renew the scheme with the MRC and with 4 industry partners - Lilly, Novartis, Roche and UCB Pharma, to appoint 13 more fellows. The previous successful format and structure will be retained as will joint leadership from the two universities. Refinements to the programme include: increasing the number of industry partners thereby allowing us to cover more therapeutic areas including cancer; lengthening of the recruitment process to give potential fellows, their supervisors and industry representatives more time to develop research projects with strong alignment; identification of a lead industry partner for each fellow from the beginning of the programme to develop a partnership from the outset; ensuring, where possible, that fellows can spend up to one year with the industry partner at their site(s) performing different aspects of their project. These changes will enhance fellows' training with industry, and also increase the input provided by industry in individual projects. There will be very strong patient and public engagement (as in the current scheme) with involvement of patients in the planning of research proposals, a number of public lectures and involvement of fellows at events such as the Manchester Science Spectacular. The Fellowship Programme will go some way to producing academics with expertise in clinical pharmacology and helping to optimise the safe, targeted prescribing of existing drugs and the development of new therapies for human disease.