AstraZeneca and University of Manchester form clinical bioinformatics partnership

Under a five-year deal, the parties will apply clinical trial bioinformatics to find cancer treatments for individual patients.

AstraZeneca has agreed to provide £11.5m to support clinical bioinformatics research, which will be led by a team of investigators in the Centre for Cancer Biomarker Sciences at the Manchester Cancer Research Centre.

The research will be undertaken in partnership with the clinical trials unit of The Christie National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust.

A new bioinformatics system will be developed to capture key information in real time. It will then present the data in the form of graphs that can be easily interpreted by clinicians to help in treating the patients.

The collaboration will also support new training programs to help investigators understand the distribution and clinical effects of medicines within the body.

AstraZeneca executive vice president of innovative medicines & early development Mene Pangalos said: "This collaboration is exciting because it will eventually allow us to incorporate important data from clinical trials into a format that can be reviewed in real time by healthcare professionals and matched with information about cancer medicines."

"We will be able to modify clinical trial programs accordingly and support clinicians to offer more accurate, personalized and rapid decision making to patients about their treatment."

Image: The new project will develop real-time data capture. Photo: courtesy of the University of Manchester.