The Manchester ECMC has become one of the largest early phase trials units in Europe. During our initial year of ECMC funding (2007/8) we had 79 recruiting early phase clinical trials and this has increased to 146 recruiting studies in 2009.10. The growth in research activity in the Manchester ECMC has been matched by substantial investment in facilities and staffing including a new purpose built clinical trials facility, the development of dedicated GCLP facilities for clinical biomarker and PK/PD research, the development of a Manchester wide Biobank and completion of comprehensive biomedical imaging facilities.

We have achieved close integration of the clinical facilities of the Christie Hospital with the laboratory facilities of the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research and the imaging facilities of the Wolfson Medical Imaging Centre.

The Manchester ECMC has developed a number of successful partnerships with the Pharmaceutical industry spanning both clinical and translational research areas. Trial management, set up and recruitment are now actively managed to ensure that studies meet their objectives and with over 13,000 new cancer patients seen at the site per year the Manchester ECMC serves a large patient population.

The Manchester ECMC has developed an international reputation for its biomarker research and with ECMC support we run several GCLP laboratories dedicated to supporting our clinical research programmes. We have developed, validated and implemented multiple biomarkers for clinical trials and our expertise and experience in this field are increasingly sought by sponsors. There has been substantial expansion in our sample collection capacity and our early phase trials unit (Derek Crowther Unit) collected over 11,000 research samples during 2009 and both sample handling and QA support has been ECMC supported. Our ECMC funding has also enabled us to develop a city wide Biobank and further expansion of our collections for translational research are planned.

The Manchester ECMC has developed high-quality imaging facilities including MR- and PET based imaging and we now have almost 50 oncology experimental imaging projects with 18 different principal investigators.

The clinical use of Radio-immunotherapy (RIT) is showing highly promising results in a range of haematological malignancies. Manchester’s ECMC has developed the largest portfolio of early phase RIT trials anywhere in Europe. Highlights during the last year have been the RIT group representation of the Manchester ECMC at the NCRI meeting in Birmingham and national press coverage during 2009. This small but highly successful research group has published no fewer than four papers in Blood during 2009 with a further high impact paper in Clinical Cancer Research.