The 2nd EVOluTION summer school was held over two days at QMUL’s leafy Charterhouse square campus in London on the 10th and 11th of September. In addition to the 11 ESRs, 13 PhD students from across the School of Medicine and Dentistry attended the four very informative sessions. The school started with the 5th transferable skills training module on research ethics presented by Nick Goulding, Professor in Biopharmacology and Pastoral lead at the School of Medicine and Dentistry. Prof Goulding posed some very interesting questions when thinking about how we should conduct our research. Dr Sarah Barnes then led an interactive session on public engagement and inspired the students to create new ways to interact with and target  specific public groups in order to tailor their dissemination and outreach activities. The afternoon switched tack with a session on genomics and large data sets; Prof Clare Turnbull gave a fascinating plenary lecture on genetic susceptibility for cancer prevention. There were also presentations from Dr Stefano Piero on a novel software programme to link health, omics and biobanking data, Dr Eirini Marouli presented an interesting talk on the genetics of human height and Prof David Van Heel spoke about the East London Genes and Health project.  Our final speaker for the day was Dr Damian Smedley from our associate partner Genomics England, who gave an overview of the 100 000 genomes project and the international mouse phenotyping consortium. 

On the second day the morning session was devoted to clinical drug development and led by our associate partner UCB. There were 5 very interesting talks on the different types of in vitro assays (Dr Adrian Moore), the 3 Rs  (replace, reduce and refine) in animal research (Dr Gareth Davies), in vivo pharmacology (Dr Adrian Moore),  modelling and simulation (Dr Mark Penney)  and  concluded with the development of one of UCB’s flagship projects on sclerostin,  by Dr Gill Holdsworth. In the afternoon session the talks focused on unbiased technologies for new target identification  with respect to transcriptomics ( Dr Myles Lewis),  phosphoproteomics (Dr Pedro Cutillas) and the session ended with a fascinating talk by Prof Chris Thiemermann on drug repurposing of the antimalarial drug artesunate for use in trauma care. The summer school concluded with an ESR journal club, the penultimate one of the programme. 

The remainder of the week was spent learning about the clinical trial process with our associate partner IQVIA at their European headquarters in Reading. We began with an introductions session led by Kaye Hallett, Vice President and Director of next generation clinical operations. Each ESR was able to describe  to the rest of the group what they wanted to achieve from the workshop and what their future career aspirations were. After lunch,  Dr Lynne Hughes gave a presentation on project leadership and her role in drug development strategy. Ian Workman then led a very interactive session discussing the quality assurance aspect of the organisation and what measures are put in place to ensure that clinical trials meet the required standards. On the second day of the workshop we heard from Paula Jefferies on feasibility studies and how she  identifies appropriate sites to run clinical trials for IQVIA’s clients. Nikki Martin, a regulatory and start up specialist, then took us through all the documents and  submissions that need to be completed before a clinical trial can take place (e.g. MHRA submission,  ethics approvals, contracts and budget). The final talk of the morning was given by Paraskevi Memsta, a senior clinical research associate and her duties and experience in this role.  For the remainder of the day the students listened to talks on data management (Kate Peacock), medical writing (Corrine Willmott) and market access (Shauna Birtles and Helena Jordan). On the final day of the workshop, Justin Watts, Director of next generation clinical operations provided some insight on how the company uses and applies data to develop prime sites strategies and recruit patients onto the clinical trials. 

The EVOluTION Summer School 2018 programme is available to download here: EVOluTION summer school 2018 programme FINAL [PDF 1,533KB]