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OCTO

The Oncology Clinical Trials Office (OCTO) is based at the University of Oxford and is concerned with the practical application of high-quality clinical research into innovative and effective cancer therapies and prevention strategies particularly in the field of gastrointestinal cancer.

OCTO's key aims are to:

• improve both survival rates and the quality of life of cancer patients by contributing to the evidence-base that will underpin cancer services now and in the future, and
• to bring about major and continuing improvements in the quality of practice in clinical research.

These aims will be achieved in partnership with academic-led research communities, with industry and with patients and their carers. We aspire to put OCTO on a par with the best in the world, and to establish it as a national and international leader in its approach to the integration of research, treatment and care for cancer patients.

We work with many companies, charities and funders to deliver high quality trials. Lead by Prof David Kerr and Dr Rachel Midgley, we have recruited almost 10,000 patients into trials over the last 10 years and have established excellent working relationships with almost 250 sites across the UK, Eastern Europe and Australia.

We have expertise in running large phase III trials (including the QUASAR trials and the VICTOR trial in adjuvant colorectal cancer) but have continued to grow, expanding our portfolio to include new phase II and III trials in upper GI, melanoma, pancreatic and cervical cancers in both adjuvant and advanced disease, as well as trials assessing preventative and surgical interventions.

One of our unique strengths is our fantastic record in collecting blood, tumour tissue and paired normal tissue from the patients recruited into our studies. We now have banks of more than 1500 tumour samples and 1000 blood samples with excellent quality clinical follow-up data. This is an extremely rare resource and one that we utilise to feed world class translational research, both with academic collaborators and Pharma partners.

OCTO is part of the Department of Oncology at The University of Oxford.

Click here to view Services offered by OCTO.

OCTRU

The Oxford Clinical Trials Research Unit (OCTRU) integrates the work of OCTO and CSM (Centre for Statistics in Medicine). For further information click here.