CCP-UK study team thanked for their hard work
On behalf of the study team, David Porter, Research Delivery Manager at the NIHR Clinical Research Network Thames Valley and South Midlands (CRN TVSM), discusses achievements of the Clinical Characterisation Protocol-UK (CCP-UK) study, which collected data on COVID-19 patients to guide international research and policy decisions.
The International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium (ISARIC) was founded in 2011 to prevent illness and deaths from infectious disease outbreaks. It is a global federation of clinical research networks, providing a coordinated and agile research response to outbreak-prone infectious disease.
In response to COVID-19, one of the consortium’s key tools was the Clinical Characterisation Protocol-UK (CCP-UK), which supported the collection of COVID-19 data and samples to enable the international research required to tackle the global pandemic.
CCP-UK was incredibly successful. Data was collected by over 2,650 research nurses and medical students across 372 sites in the UK. This provided dynamic data in near real time to policy makers, including essential weekly updates to the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) that helped to guide the public health response. It also helped to characterise COVID-19 disease in adults and children, describe the magnitude and variation of hospital-acquired infection by site and region and develop tools to identify people most at risk of deterioration and death. Samples collected provided the foundations for our understanding of the mechanisms of disease. The outputs from the study are summarised on the study website.
The study’s joint chief investigators Calum Semple and Kenneth Baillie have recently reported that although the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, the primary study objectives to provide rapid, coordinated clinical investigation of patients with confirmed COVID-19 have now been met for this outbreak. They have therefore decided with the funders to stop recruitment at the end of February 2022.
CCP-UK is not closed but remains in place as a ‘sleeping’ protocol to be activated in the event of any new threat. Sites may still be called upon to collect samples from people exposed to ‘variants of concern’ or other emerging pathogens. To be ready for the next threat, it is necessary to maintain both ethical and NHS management approval at all hospital sites.
Since being activated in January 2020, teams at our CRN’s sites including John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford; Milton Keynes University Hospital, Royal Berkshire Hospital, Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Wycombe Hospital have committed a huge amount of time and effort to the study. Royal Berkshire Hospital was one of the top twenty highest recruiting sites nationally and the John Radcliffe Hospital was the second highest recruiting site for tier 2 samples. Across all our sites, there were over 6,500 participants and we would like to thank all involved for their hard work and dedication under very challenging circumstances.
