£900,000 boost for child drug research

The study, called Pamper, will involve York-based Garner Consulting and Liverpool University’s Centre for Drug Safety Sciences.

It will use a sensitive analytical instrument known as an accelerator mass spectrometer to measure the drug concentration in small blood volumes.

Model drugs will be studied in pre-term to two-year-old infants who will be enrolled at Liverpool’s Alder Hey Children’s Hospital as well as a children’s clinic in Tartu, Estonia.

The laboratory work will take place at Liverpool University while the drug analysis will be carried out in Zeist, The Netherlands.

Professor Colin Garner, the head of Garner Consulting, said: “This research programme will devise new methods to speed the development of drugs for children and should be faster and safer than currently used approaches. It will also allow better data to be generated using fewer children.”

Prof Garner said the pharmaceutical industry had tended to focus on adult therapies and there are very few drugs specifically developed for childhood diseases.

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