The Clinical Research Podcast

However good research is, if it stays in the lab or on a hard drive somewhere, isn't going to help anyone and of course the reality is that researchers do literally get points for how many people see their publications. But how do you do that? How do break out of the world of peer reviewed journals and  This episode is an interview with Rory Cellan Jones who was the BBC's tech editor so he's...

However good your research is, if it stays in the lab or on a hard drive somewhere, isn't going to help anyone, or let alone improve your REF number. But how do you cut through and explain your research to a wider audience? In the next episode of the Nottingham Clinical Research podcast, I talked to former BBC tech editor Rory Cellan Jones ( @ruskin147 )about how to explain science to non-scientis...

One in eight women in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer, and like most cancers, the sooner it can be detected, the better the patient's prospects. That's why there's a national screening programme for women over fifty. which has been successful at cutting the mortality rate. But it's a one size fits all solution at a time where medicine is getting more personalised. Some breast tissue is...

If your child was seriously ill enough that they had to take their nutrients through a tube into their stomach, you might assume as a parent, you'd follow everything medics told you to the letter. But a few years ago, doctors and nurses began to realise that rather than the prescribed commercial 'feed', a lot of those parents were giving their child real food - blended up. Researchers started to a...

When a child or young person comes to hospital in an emergency and mental health issues are clearly involved, how do we know how we can help them best? Health professionals can be unsure what to look for, what to do about they see, and how to judge how much they're helping the situation. Dr Joseph Manning MBE, a clinical academic nurse at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and NIHR lecturer...

When a child or young person comes to hospital in an emergency and mental health issues are clearly involved, how do we know how we can help them best? Health professionals can be unsure what to look for, what to do about they see, and how to judge how much they're helping the situation.  Dr Joseph Manning MBE, a clinical academic nurse at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust and NIHR le...

About one in eight people in the UK have asthma attacks and researchers at the Nottingham Asthma Centre (part of Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust) are studying how to stop the early symptoms of an attack turning into a serious event. We need volunteers to help us research the different triggers and symptoms, so we can find new ways to treat the condition and reduce the use of steroid tabl...

Alcoholism is one of the biggest factors in liver disease, and a dual diagnosis of alcoholism and mental health problems is very common  - it's more than solely a physical illness - so understanding how to support people as they recover from alcoholism is a really important way to help cut liver disease.  Mohsen Subhani is a clinical research fellow and a liver disease specialist at NIHR...

This interview with Professor Ana Valdes was done in February but we're only posting it now (in April) because it relates to a paper she co-authored which has only just been published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases. It's about covid and the Zoe app, and focuses on the omicron variant. Now government funding for the Zoe app's been stopped (though the app itself is still going strong) and omicron...

The contents of your stomach may not seem to have much to do with skin cancer, but one of our  studies seems to show that there are specific microbiome bugs which may be the key to treating melanoma more effectively with immunotherapy. Exactly how the microbiome helps us fight cancer is still a newish area of research and this study is one of the largest of its kind, with data from across the...

Good things come in small packages, as the saying goes, and this could certainly be applied to the sexual health research team at NUH. As well as seeing around 50,000 patients a year, they were the top recruiter in the trust in 2018, and have got over 150 patients on to a game-changing prophylaxis for HIV. Research and Innovation’s Andrew Bennett caught up with Dr Ashini Fox, who’s a consultant ph...

Find out how we're breaking down the barriers to better health for women everywhere.

Research needs data and data needs - in the end - patients. Our researchers spend a lot of time Identifying the right patients for our studies, and more importantly, our patients spend a lot of time  helping us. The more efficiently we can  use the samples and other data they give us, the more we can help them. That's what the new Nottingham Bioresource is about - it pulls together sampl...

One of the problems for treating gastro intestinal conditions is that it's hard to predict exactly how things dissolve in our guts. The food industry would dearly like to know more, and so would our gastro intestinal researchers, because if we knew how things fall apart in our colons, we can make drugs for conditions like Crohn's disease far more effective. But even with the latest imaging techniq...

This week is #tinnitusweek, organised by @BritishTinnitus . But for the ten percent of the population who have the condition - every week is tinnitus week.  I talked to @DrDavidBaguley , who's a Professor of Hearing Sciences at the University of Nottingham and heads up the Clinical Hearing Sciences group within the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre (@hearingnihr), about the the resea...

How can you make a difference as a clinical researcher? University of Nottingham respiratory medicine professor and NHS consultant, Dominick Shaw, talks to Matt Hurst about the four things you need to when you're starting out.  Read more on his blog post at 50 at 50: Standing on the shoulders of giants This Podcast is brought to you by the Research & Innovation team at Nottingham Universi...

How we make the most of their huge capacity for data, and processing, and artificial intelligence and the issues they  might bring is actually the bit that is increasingly important these days, and this episode is a discussion about what Nottingham data scientists are doing in that area. You'll hear  Phil Quinlan, who's the head of Digital Research Service at the University of Nottingham...

For obvious and unavoidable reasons, all the research heroes experiences this year have been about dealing with Covid, but this particular hero had something else going on. Before Covid, Zoe Rose, was a research nurse in gastroenterology, but she was also coping with a personal tragedy of her own. Looking back on it now, she talks about how  the intensity of the work during that first wave, a...

'Big data' is often a bogeyman term, but at the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, reworking how we used data helped keep Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust running, and our radiologists were at the forefront of pioneering diagnostic techniques. Interviewees Dr Andrew Fogarty , NUH chest medicine physician and University of Nottingham epidemiologist Dr Mark Simmonds , who had just taken up to...

This week our guest is Professor Guru Aithal, Deputy Director of the NIHR Nottingham Biomedical Research Centre and a world-leading researcher in gastrointestinal and liver disorders. Professor Aithal talks to Matt Hurst from Research & Innovation about how science and his own personal experiences have shaped his views on why every researcher needs to build trust with ethnic communities. In a...

Our guest this episode is Helen Navarra from the Children's Research Team at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust. Helen is in conversation with Andrew Bennett and explains how COVID-19 changed everything for families taking part in clinical research at our hospitals. Helen herself is one of several members of the Children's Research Team, as well as the whole team and the work they did in pa...

An introduction to a report on a joint project between Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (and the Major Trauma Centre it hosts), and national charities Redthread and the Health Foundation. Violent crime victims are often caught up in a lifestyle that's going to see them returning to Nottingham's emergency department over and over again, often with more and more serious injuries. It's not j...

Kathryn Fairbrother is the new Head of Nursing for Research & Innovation at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust.  In this episode of The Clinical Research Podcast she talks about what inspired her as a nurse to get involved in clinical research and how she is hoping to now inspire other nurses - and healthcare professionals - to embark on their own research careers. Kathryn is in co...

This episode's Research Hero is Laura Looby a children's clinical research nurse - normally. Fairly early on in the Covid outbreak it became clear that relatively few children were being affected so she was drafted to help with adult covid patients many of whom were at the other end of the age spectrum. She mentions 'dex' at one point. That's dexamethasone, one of the drugs trialled against Covid-...

In the UK, about 1.3 million people are living with COPD - chronic obstructive pulmonary disease - , and there's no cure - but there's a lot of research into its treatment. In one type of COPD, emphysema, disease destroys alveoli in the lung so they can't transfer oxygen into the blood. It doesn't just mean there's less working lung, it means the now useless lung is taking up chest space so the pa...