Collaboration with other projects
TACT is currently collaborating with the following projects:
conect4children (c4c)
Conect4children (c4c) is a large collaborative paediatric network that aims to facilitate the development of new drugs and other therapies for the entire paediatric population in Europe. It is a pioneering opportunity to build capacity for the implementation of multinational paediatric clinical trials whilst ensuring the needs of babies, children, young people and their families are met.
c4c endeavours to provide a sustainable, integrated infrastructure for the efficient and swift delivery of high-quality clinical trials in children and young people across all conditions and phases of the drug development process.
An important task of the consortium is to deliver the advice needed to improve child health and paediatric medicine development. A number of disease specific expert groups, as well as cross cutting groups for neonatology, adolescent medicine and an innovative methodology group, have been established to provide expert advice on clinical trial design.
Based on the success of the TACT model, Prof. Volker Straub (TACT secretariat) was invited to be the group lead for the neuromuscular expert group, which includes members of the TACT core committee. Our involvement in this project will allow us to share with newly established disease specific expert groups, the valuable experience that TACT has accumulated over the past ten years and 60 applications for advice reviewed.
c4c project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU), Europe’s biggest Public-Private Partnership, under grant agreement No 777389. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA (the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Association).
European Joint Programme for Rare Disease (EJP RD)
The overarching ambition of the European Joint Programme for Rare Diseases (EJP RD) is to establish a comprehensive strategy covering research, data, tools and clinics leading to optimisation and exploitation of results, higher and timely diagnostic rates, faster drug discovery at reduced costs, improved patients’ care, as well as giving Europe a leading role in the field of rare diseases in the coming years.
Through the EJP RD partners from Newcastle University, where the TACT secretariat is based, will create an online toolkit which will provide other rare disease networks with guidance, procedural instruction and template documents to replicate the TACT model. The Advisory Committee for Therapeutics (ACT) toolkit will sit in a virtual library, known as the Innovation Management Toolbox, and will be made available through the EJP RD website in early 2020.
The ability to prioritise drug development according to objective criteria is particularly critical in rare diseases with large unmet needs and a limited number of patients who can be enrolled into clinical trials. The objective of an ACT is to provide advice which will allow the sponsor to position the candidate compound along a realistic and well informed pathway to a clinical trial.
For further information, please contact Joanne Lee.
EJP RD project is funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under Grant Agreement N°825575.