A first-of-its-kind Clinical Trials Unit has opened at the Mater Hospital in Dublin, allowing Irish patients with terminal cancer to take part in the testing of possible new medicinal therapies that were previously only available overseas, reports RTE.
For eligible patients, the START facility will provide a free service, and it anticipates enrolling about 50 patients in the first year of Phase 1 studies.
In a few years, it anticipates enrolling about 300 patients, reports RTE.
Dr. Austin Duffy, Director of the Clinical Trial Unit at the Mater Hospital, stated on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland that the project is aimed to provide patients with access to innovative, new alternatives.
“So the typical patient who will take part in our trials will be someone who does have a cancer, which could be described as advanced, which can’t be removed by surgery, and it’s being controlled by medicines, but they might have been through (multiple) lines of chemotherapy, or similar treatment, and maybe they haven’t worked, or maybe they did work and stopped working. They’re fit, they’re well, their blood tests are okay, and they might be working, and they want to now try something new,” reports RTE.
“You’re dealing with drugs that are at the very beginning of their journey in development, and it’s the first time that you’re giving them to patients – you’re trying to figure out the dose, the side effects, and whether it works. “It won’t cost the taxpayer a penny, in fact, it’s the opposite – it creates jobs, and it brings money into the system because any test that we do will be reimbursed by the sponsor of the study,” reports RTE.
Every year, more than 40,000 people receive a cancer diagnosis here.
The Mater, University College Dublin, and START Cancer Research in San Antonio, Texas, have partnered to provide the START Dublin service, reports RTE.
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