The Health and Care Secretary has announced that thousands of patients could benefit from potential treatments for COVID-19 that will be fast-tracked through a new national clinical trial. This platform will accelerate the development of new drugs for patients hospitalised with COVID-19, reducing the time taken to set up clinical studies for new therapies from months to just weeks and helping to ease pressure on the NHS and ultimately save lives.

This collaborative programme is known as the ACCORD (Accelerating COVID-19 Research & Development platform). It brings together a single, UK-wide clinical trial platform to rapidly test potential drugs through early stage clinical trials and feed them into the UK’s large-scale COVID-19 studies. This includes the RECOVERY trial, currently the world’s largest randomised controlled clinical trial for COVID-19 treatment.

Tim Sheppard IQVIA UK GM and SVP Northern Europe said: “COVID-19 is the greatest public health challenge that has faced the world in a generation. Hyper-accelerating clinical trials of medicines in discovery pipelines could be instrumental in saving many lives in the UK and beyond.”

The news follows last week’s announcement that work has started on two potential vaccine trials at the University of Oxford and Imperial College. The development of a vaccine will also be helped by the launch of a major national test study that will test up to 300,000 people in their own households over the next twelve months. It will also include antibody testing to help understand levels of immunity as well as the current rate of infection. This, along with the large-scale expansion of coronavirus testing announced on Wednesday, will feed into scientist’s knowledge of the virus and help the government to plan the next stages of their strategy.

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