A coordinated strategy to scale-up advanced therapies for patients in Manchester

"Advance Therapies are a new generation of treatments which use patients' cells as 'drug' to treat a variety of diseases. Although encouraging results have been reported, this technology is complex, expensive and currently only available to small numbers of patients.

We have formed the Innovate Manchester Advanced Therapy Centre Hub (iMATCH); this is a group of collaborators who share a vision of working more efficiently together so we can offer Advanced Therapies to more children and adult patients with cancer and non-cancer diseases.

iMATCH unites experts from The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, The University of Manchester and 9 businesses with specific expertise in different aspects of delivering Advanced Therapies. Our 9 commercial partners are; Cellular Therapeutics, Aptusclinical, Chaucer, Datatrial, Formedix, Asymptote, AstraZeneca, Agenus and The Christie Pathology Partnership.

iMATCH will resolve the challenges and expand facilities to allow us to design and run larger clinical trials so that we can to treat greater numbers of patients within the NHS, safely and efficiently.

We are going to focus on;

* Coordinating patient cell collection
* Processing and storage of those cells
* Developing efficient systems to track samples from the patient, through manufacture and back to the patient
* Ensure we have all the information we need, from each patient we treat, to know whether a clinical trial has been a success; this will include long term follow-up of patients

These clinical trials are complex and challenging to run; it is important that we provide specific education for our doctors, nurses and the teams that support them. We want to define the education packages needed then offer this training to all Manchester-based partners, then any national and international teams. This will increase the use of Advanced Therapies world-wide.

Manchester is an excellent choice for this investment by Innovate UK; we have a large population of 3.2 million people, two substantial hospital sites with existing experience offering these treatments to a variety of patients, a devolved Health Care System and an ability to draw together companies who can help us to overcome the complex challenges. Together we will improve patient outcomes."