UK research: Council considers economies

The UK Medical Research Council and clinical trials, 1934-1960

1940-1949: Randomised controlled trial design pioneered MRC scientists developed what is today the gold standard for clinical trial design while testing streptomycin to treat pulmonary tuberculosis. Although the MRC failed to make any substantive contribution to the development of trial methods before the 1940s, it made exceptionally important contributions between 1944 and 1960. Surprisingly, ...

Research in progress: Medical Research Council United Kingdom Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK).

The UK Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme (RASP-UK) will explore novel biomarker stratification strategies in severe asthma to improve clinical management and accelerate development of new therapies. Prior asthma mechanistic studies have not stratified on inflammatory phenotype and the understanding of pathophysiological mechanisms in asthma without Type 2 cytokine inflammation is limit...

The Medical Research Council (UK)/Uganda Virus Research Institute Uganda Research Unit on AIDS – ‘25 years of research through partnerships’

For the past 25 years, the Medical Research Council/Uganda Virus Research Institute Uganda Research Unit on AIDS has conducted research on HIV-1, coinfections and, more recently, on non-communicable diseases. Working with various partners, the research findings of the Unit have contributed to the understanding and control of the HIV epidemic both in Uganda and globally, and informed the future ...

New UK council to curb psychiatry.

Medical Research Council

What is it famous for? While being the main UK government's agency for funding biomedical research, it is probably best known for having nurtured British molecular biology in Cambridge in the golden decade of the 1950s — whence came the double helix model of DNA (James Watson and Francis Crick), the first amino-acid sequence of a protein (insulin, Fred Sanger), and the first three-dimensional p...