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Date: 22 May 2012
Time: 17:03
Health bus boosts key clinical studies
Story posted/last updated: 25 March 2011
People in Birmingham who volunteered for the first clinical trials aboard a special ‘health bus’ in the city centre last week, have helped change the way research for major health issues is carried out in the community.
The Health Research Bus (HRB) has been developed by the University of Birmingham and is the first facility of its kind in the UK. The health bus is funded by Birmingham Science City and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity as part of its research grants programme and led jointly by the Universities of Birmingham and Warwick.
The bus operates in collaboration with regional healthcare providers including University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust and Birmingham Children’s NHS Trust. It aims to revolutionise how clinical research for conditions including diabetes, obesity and ageing is carried out in the community.
Members of the public were invited to take part in research studies organised by the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility (WTCRF) at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital. The first was to collect DNA samples to be used as a healthy comparison against a bank of samples for patients suffering from a disease called vasculitis (inflammation of the blood vessels).
“We want to find out if there are certain genetic traits that the patients display so we need a wide range of samples from non-disease sufferers to compare them with,” explained Dr Julie Williams from the WTCRF.
The second study involved recruiting healthy volunteers and measuring their immune response to a benign virus in their system, in order to treat patients with lupus (an autoimmune disease) in whom there is thought to be an increased reactivity. Patient samples had already been obtained and this study needed healthy volunteers for comparison.
The third study looked at levels of fatigue in patients with vasculitis, as this has a huge impact on their quality of life. As Julie explained: “Again, we are looking for healthy volunteers to compare with our patient cohorts.”
Participants and other members of the public were able to step inside the state-of-the-art bus, which houses procedure and treatment rooms and IT facilities as well as a £100,000 DXA scanner, used for measuring body composition and bone density.
Professor Paul Stewart, Dean of Medicine at the University of Birmingham and Director of the Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility, added: “The “bus” is the first of its kind in the UK and enables clinical researchers in Birmingham to access a large population of diverse ethic and socio-economic mix in the surrounding community.
“Using the bus will widen participation in clinical trials across all sectors of society through a start-of-the-art facility linked back to our hospital base at UHB. The bus will be a crucial way of rapidly conducting trials and ensuring their results are implemented quickly to improve the health of patients in Birmingham and beyond.”
More information on how you can support patients being treated at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham is available on the QEHB Charity website.
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