LSTM’s Accelerator Research Clinic shortlisted for the 2019 North West Research and Innovation awards.

News article 18 Jan 2019
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 The Respiratory Research Team from LSTM’s Accelerator Research Clinic (ARC) have been shortlisted for Team of the Year for the 2019 North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards

Dr Andrea Collins, LSTM’s Senior Clinical Lecturer and ARC Director, is delighted that the unit has been acknowledged so positively. She said: “It is great news to have been announced as a finalist in these awards. The team at ARC work hard to continuously monitor and improve the experience of research participants as we move towards ever more innovative and novel vaccines candidates, this nomination is testament to their success so far. I am also extremely pleased for my colleague Dr Victoria Connor who has been an excellent researcher and is an excellent clinician, having completed her MD in less than two years.”   

The awards are a collaboration between the Innovation Agency, (the Academic Health Science Network for the North West Coast), the NIHR Clinical Research Network North West Coast; and NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care North West Coast (CLAHRC NWC).

The aim is to celebrate success for the excellent work being undertaken across the region in clinical research and innovation in health and the winners across all the categories will be announced at an event at the Hilton Liverpool Hotel on 7th March.

A partnership between LSTM and the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospital NHS Trust, ARC is managed by Senior Research Nurse Angie Hyder-Wright and uses a multitude of innovative approaches to research design, recruitment and delivery with all studies recruited to time and target. Utilising the unique model designed at LSTM to challenge and monitor pneumococcal carriage in healthy volunteers, the team moved to a new state-of-the-art clinic facility in the Liverpool Life Sciences Accelerator building facilitating rapid sample processing and efficient working between the clinical and lab teams.

The team is led by LSTM’s Professor Daniela Ferreira and has gone from strength to strength over the past decade completing over 26 studies and recruiting more than 2000 participants. They are further represented in the nominations by Dr Victoria Connor, who is one of the finalists in the category of Research Student of the Year. As an MD student she worked on understanding how streptococcus pneumoniae is transmitted from person to person, showing that the bacteria can be transmitted via hands rather than just airborne transmission.