New clinical trial unit opens for Irish cancer patients

Irish patients with advanced cancer will be able to participate in the testing of potential new drug treatments that were previously only available abroad, at a first of its kind Clinical Trials Unit opened at the Mater Hospital in Dublin.

The START unit hopes to have around 50 patients enrolled in the first year of Phase 1 trials and it will be a free service for suitable patients.

It expects to have around 300 patients enrolled in a few years.

Speaking on RTÉ's Morning Ireland, Dr Austin Duffy, Director of the Clinical Trial Unit at the Mater Hospital, said that it is hoped the initiative will offer patients the opportunity to avail of new, cutting-edge options.

He said that while the Phase 1 Critical Trials Unit is a little bit less restrictive in terms of the types of cancer that are treated, this trial "won’t be for everybody".

"So the typical patient who will take part in our trials will be someone who does have a cancer, which could be described as advanced, which can’t be removed by surgery, and it’s being controlled by medicines, but they might have been through (multiple) lines of chemotherapy, or similar treatment, and maybe they haven’t worked, or maybe they did work and stopped working,

"They’re fit, they’re well, their blood tests are okay, and they might be working, and they want to now try something new."

He said that the trial is on an experimental basis.

"You’re dealing with drugs that are at the very beginning of their journey in development, and it’s the first time that you’re giving them to patients - you're trying to figure out the dose, the side effects, and whether it works."

It is part of a public-private partnership which "creates jobs", Dr Duffy said.

"This is embedded within the Mater Public Hospital so it’s within the public system, it won't cost patients a penny, you don’t need insurance to take part in this.

"It won’t cost the taxpayer a penny, in fact, it’s the opposite - it creates jobs, and it brings money into the system because any test that we do will be reimbursed by the sponsor of the study."

Over 40,000 people are diagnosed with cancer here each year.

The START Dublin service is a collaboration between the Mater, University College Dublin and START Cancer Research in San Antonio, Texas.