Leading health researchers in Oxford have been recognised in a prestigious national competition. Eight professors have been named National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Senior Investigators in recognition of their “outstanding contribution to clinical and applied health and social care research”. The successful candidates are all prominent researchers in the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre … Read more
News for Antimicrobial Resistance and Modernising Microbiology
Oxford research project wins digital award for Bashing the Bug!
An Oxford-based international online project to tackle antibiotic resistance has picked up a national health research award. BashTheBug, an initiative funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), brings together volunteers from all over the world to take part in the online research study, which has looked at hundreds … Read more
Pregnant women to help test vaccine against childhood virus
Pregnant women receiving antenatal care in the Women’s Centre at Oxford’s John Radcliffe Hospital (JR) may be asked to take part in a world-first clinical trial to find a vaccine against a common and potentially serious viral infection in babies. Women are being asked if they would like to take part in a research trial … Read more
Drop ‘complete the course’ message for antibiotics, experts say
Oxford researchers are among a group of infectious disease experts to argue that the advice that patients should complete a course of antibiotics is not supported by evidence and should be dropped. In a paper published on Thursday by the BMJ, the authors, who include National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Oxford Biomedical Research Centre … Read more
Public invited to help tackle antibiotic resistance
An online project has been launched to study antibiotic resistance in Tuberculosis (TB) with the help of the public. The project website, bashthebug.net, shows volunteers images of a series of small, circular wells, each containing M.tuberculosis (the bug that causes TB) and a different dose of an antibiotic. The users are then asked to identify … Read more
England world leaders in the use of Whole Genome Sequencing to diagnose TB
In a world-first, Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) is now being used to identify different strains of tuberculosis, announced Public Health England today. This is the first time that WGS has been used as a diagnostic solution for managing a disease on this scale anywhere in the world. This builds on WGS based services for public … Read more
New trial for blindness rewrites the genetic code
Researchers have started a new gene therapy clinical trial to treat X-linked retinitis pigmentosa (XLRP), the most common cause of blindness in young people. Retinitis pigmentosa is currently untreatable and leads to a slow and irreversible loss of vision. On 16 March 2017, a 29-year-old British man became the first patient with X-linked retinitis pigmentosa … Read more
Genetic sequencing offers same-day TB testing
Researchers have for the first time shown that standard tuberculosis (TB) diagnostic tests can be replaced by a sub-24 hour genetic test applied to the TB bacteria in a patient’s sputum. It currently takes up to two months to obtain the full diagnostic information for a patient with TB, as the bacteria grow very slowly … Read more
Antibiotics, not dirty hospitals, the main cause of C. difficile epidemic
Restricting the use of a common antibiotic was more important than a high profile “deep clean” of hospitals in massively reducing UK antibiotic resistant Clostridium difficile (C. diff) cases, a major new study has found. The study concluded that overuse of antibiotics like ciprofloxacin led to the outbreak of severe diarrhoea caused by C. difficile … Read more
Faster TB results from BRC-backed research
Whole Genome Sequencing is a faster, cheaper and more effective way of diagnosing tuberculosis, according to a new study published in the journal Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Dr Louise Pankhurst of the University of Oxford and a team of worldwide collaborators including Public Health England utilised innovative DNA technology to diagnose cases of tuberculosis (TB) up … Read more