Delivering early phase cancer trials during COVID-19 pandemic and development of ECMC COVID-19 Community Hub - online launch event on 19 October
Wondering what other centres do to overcome the challenges of COVID-19 for early phase trials? Interested in contributing to sharing best practice? Don’t know who to ask about COVID-19 implications when planning future trials? Then join ECMC North in the educational event to help develop a framework for delivery during the pandemic.
ECMC North - the northern ECMC sites - have worked together over lockdown to obtain a Pfizer Quality and Process Improvement Educational Grant to run a web-based educational event and then set up a digital information platform. The focus of this will be how pre-clinical and clinical units have adapted to continue safely delivering early phase cancer trials; we will develop an on-line Community Hub of curated outputs as an educational resource for all early phase cancer trials units.
The launch event will be held online on 19 October 2020 13.00-16.40, and ECMC members across the whole network are welcome to attend. The format of this event will include up to 6 short plenary talks by leading experts, covering international, regulatory, industry and academic perspectives and then 4 parallel interactive workshops that will initiate development of the community hub materials and planned position papers. The workshops will cover clinical and laboratory adaptations to the pandemic and use of digital tools; importantly PPI will be a key theme, including advice on how we continue to adapt in these changing times.
The event is open to all: ECMC members, PPI representatives, industry representatives, and the NIHR/NCRI network, with a choice of which workshop to join. Following the meeting we invite participants to continue contributing as we build the Community Hub outputs and write position papers. In particular, we would like to link to Early Career Researchers as we develop the online platform, so please circulate the link below widely in your centres.
We have secured funding for IT and medical writing support for the launch event and an on-line platform. We hope this exciting initiative will provide a valuable resource as we all continue to deliver cutting edge early phase cancer trials via the ECMC network despite the challenges and restrictions of the current pandemic. All participants are warmly invited to join us and share your experiences, we very much value input from a wide audience.