Leeds firm TPP overseeing clinical trials that may reduce impact of coronavirus

A Leeds firm is to help carry out clinical trials for selected medicines that might help reduce the duration and severity of coronavirus.

TPP has partnered with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research and Surveillance Centre (RSC) based at the University of Oxford for the initiative to run clinical trials to address the Covid-19 emergency.

The centre is one of Europe’s oldest surveillance systems and spotted the 2009 Swine flu pandemic before the virologists. It is now turning its attention to how general practice might help us mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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A letter from TPP, the RCGP and the University of Oxford is being sent to all 2600 practices in England that currently use SystmOne – TPP’s Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. This letter explains the methodology that will be used.

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This partnership will enable clinical trials of selected medicines that might reduce the duration and severity of COVID-19 including hospital admission and mortality. The RCGP RSC initiative will allow GPs using TPP SystmOne to recruit patients into the trials and then access information entered via participants using the Airmid app.

By combining patient collected data, combined with the medical record, the researchers at Oxford will be able to determine the efficacy of certain medicines.

Richard Hobbs, Head of the Oxford Department of Primary Care said ‘This has been an extraordinary collaborative effort to compress many months of work into a few days to finalise the first national COVID-19 trial outside of hospital (PRINCIPLE) led by Chris Butler, to significantly extend the only national surveillance of COVID-19 outside of hospitals, to set up a new virtual clinical data platform (ORCHID) to support these key initiatives, and consider efficient COVID information feedback to practices. This wouldn’t have been possible without existing strong relationships with partners like TPP and a huge commitment to rapidly deliver solutions for the nation.’

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Simon de Lusignan, Director of the Oxford RCGP RSC said: “We already have over 100 practices taking part in the national flu virology surveillance scheme every year in collaboration with Public Health England. We are urgently increasing this to 300 practices. However, without the support of more practices, we will struggle to recruit the numbers needed for clinical trials.”

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