News

I am very pleased to give you the latest update on our COVID-19 and related research in Nottingham.

We are, thankfully, continuing to see a fall in the number of COVID-19 infections in our communities and a corresponding reduction in the number of patients being admitted to our hospitals with the virus.

Our COVID-19 research is continuing, with even greater focus on the development of vaccines, in which we have extensive expertise in Nottingham. Last month we became one of the 14 sites around the UK taking part in the Oxford Vaccine Study, led by the University of Oxford. Approximately 250 patients have now been successfully recruited and have been randomised into the trial, receiving their vaccination in early June. A second phase of the trial, aiming to recruit another 250 volunteers, has now started. These volunteers will receive their vaccination later this month. Nottingham is investigating whether the vaccine is effective in volunteers from frontline NHS and social care staff, who will potentially have greater exposure to COVID-19 than other volunteers. The trial is open to staff from across the East Midlands. Thank you to all of our colleagues who have agreed to take part.

Across all COVID-19 research studies in Nottingham more than 2,200 patients have taken part; this research has been focused on finding the most effective treatments to reduce the impact of the virus and shorten the period of acute illness, where we can.

The data from this research tell us a lot about the development of the illness, the susceptibility of patients who may go on to develop severe symptoms and the effectiveness of existing and new drugs to the disease. However, there is still a lot that we don’t know, for example why some characteristics such as ethnicity, gender and age are such a major determinant of severe illness. Encouragingly though we are starting to see the translation of research findings into patient care. Colleagues from our Respiratory Theme, working with the clinical teams at Nottingham University Hospitals, are developing new follow-up procedures for patients who have been treated for COVID-19 and discharged home. The late-effects of COVID-19 infection require a comprehensive and multi-disciplinary approach to enable patients to continue their recovery and cope with some of the ongoing symptoms that seem to be affecting some patients for many weeks after they first became infected, and we hope to run a major research project on this topic.

Through our data collaborations with the team behind the COVID-19 Symptom tracker we are also looking at a range of COVID and non COVID research questions. Colleagues at King’s College London and health science company ZOE in collaboration with researchers including Dr Ana Valdes in Nottingham recently published data showing that anosmia (loss of smell) is an important early symptom in COVID19.  She has also been addressing important questions about obesity together with researchers from our Gastro-intestinal and Liver Disorders Theme and from the US, Italy, Spain and Sweden.  Findings from the PREDICT-1 study into the body’s responses to food and nutrition show:

• Everyone is unique in the way they respond after eating food (nutritional response), so there is no one ‘right’ way to eat.
• Similarly, the optimal time to eat for nutritional health depends on the individual rather than fixed ‘perfect’ mealtimes.
• Genetics only plays a minor role in determining personal nutritional response and even identical twins can respond very differently to the same foods, suggesting that tests offering personalised nutrition advice based on a simple analysis of single factors, such as genetic make-up, are unlikely to be of value
• Optimal meal composition in terms of fat, carbohydrates, proteins and fibre (macronutrients) is also highly individual, so prescriptive diets based on fixed macronutrient ratios are too simplistic and unlikely to work for everyone.
• The relationship between the amount of calories consumed in a meal and nutritional response is not straightforward. However, individual responses to the same foods are consistent and predictable, even though responses cannot be compared between people.

Whilst COVID-19 research remains our priority, we are also looking at the opportunities to restart our research into other high priority health conditions. As infection rates continue to fall and with measures in place to keep our patients and our staff safe, we are planning to restart some research trials in the next few weeks.

We will be guided by the resumption of NHS services in our partner organisations, so that patients have the opportunity to participate in research alongside their care. Carrying out research during COVID-19 restrictions will mean the need to adapt our research processes to ensure we work remotely with patients wherever possible, that social distancing and infection control procedures are fully in place and that we equip our research facilities to accommodate new ways of carrying out interventional clinical procedures. We will proceed cautiously and in consultation with our patients and our industry, academic and regulatory partners.