MRC London Clinical Pharmacology Fellowship Programme

The London Clinical Pharmacology (LCP) Fellowship Programme unites institutions with a strong foundation in clinical pharmacology (Imperial College London; University College London; The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine - LSHTM; the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary, University of London; Kings College London; St George’s, University of London; and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency) in the common goal of:

training aspirant clinician-scientists from a broad range of therapeutic areas in the principles and techniques of Experimental & Translational Medicine and
sustaining a cohort of career clinical pharmacologists/toxicologists.

It creates an unrivalled partnership of expertise (over 100 PIs in Pharmacology, including 20 Clinical Pharmacologists, in a small radius) and resource (imaging, -omic platforms, patient databases) that covers all aspects along the “critical pathway” for drug development (in particular, exposure to basic pharmacology, the development of conventional small molecule and biological agents, first-in-human studies, clinical trial design, drug regulation, pharmaco-epidemiology and pharmacovigilance).

The programme seeks to provide eight 3-year inter-disciplinary clinical PhD fellowships and depth in training through access to a range of existing Masters courses. A key theme for the Fellowships will be the basis of inter-individual variation in drug responses and will focus on how the new tools of experimental medicine - imaging, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and innovative clinical trial design – can be integrated to enable more efficient, science-led development of new therapies. This speaks to the need to develop the skill base required for the development of stratified medicines, recognised as the future for drug development by both the Pharmaceutical Industry and Academia and currently a topic of interest for the Technology Strategy Board. Success in this arena is essential to retain the UK at the forefront of expertise in human pharmacology.

The LCP Programme is an ideal format for this. It builds on existing relationships, including major cross-London consortia – London Genetics Ltd, the development of a pan-London PET Research Imaging Centre and a London collaborative biorepository - that will provide additional resources to enable patient stratification. The partner academic institutions have extensive experience of hosting MRC, Wellcome Trust and BHF PhD Fellowship programmes. The LCP Programme dovetails efficiently with the Wellcome Trust/GSK Translational Medicine Fellowship Programme, and together with existing NHS trainees and interested NIHR academic fellows/ lecturers, it seeks to create a ‘school’ of trainees in Experimental and Translational Medicine in London with a broad exposure to translational clinical research and a shared teaching curriculum.