CRUK City of London Centre Clinical Academic Training Programme/ Year 1 QQ2

A key priority of the CRUK City of London (CoL) Centre is to train the next generation of clinician scientists who will transform cancer outcomes.

We offer a globally unique training environment across our 4 institutions, UCL, Barts/QMUL, KCL and the Crick, and their healthcare partners.

Key strengths include the Centre faculty, comprising ≈400 internationally-recognised clinical academics and scientists, spin-out companies and a clinical hub treating a diverse population of 10 million.

Trainees will be embedded in research groups pursuing state-of-the art studies into tumour origins and evolution, response to intervention, and increasing treatment options for adult and paediatric malignancies.

Our CRUK-funded clinical training programme (CATP) commenced in 2019: 18 Clinical Research Training Fellows (CRTFs) and 9 MBPhD students have started PhDs, working closely with a cohort of non-clinical PhD students to gain deep knowledge of cancer biotherapeutics. Our first cohort have or will shortly submit, and more recent appointees are set for timely completion.

Our CATP trainees have received prizes, presented at international meetings, co-authored >30 research papers, including in internationally visible journals such as Nature and Nature Medicine, and secured post-PhD funding.

Every year we received many more high-quality applicants than funded posts and given the success of our programme, the breadth of science and number of faculty, we are applying for 7 CRTF and 3 MBPhD students per annum.

The CoL Centre Executive Board is responsible for and makes final decisions on the CATP and is well-supported by a diverse training team and the Training Steering Committee that oversees the programme. We have implemented a centralised recruitment process, competitive for both students and supervisors.

To extend the breadth of our research and to ensure trainees are well-placed to make a strong start on their PhD, we have refined our recruitment process to give CRTFs freedom to develop their projects in their areas of interest prior to interview.

All projects must align with the Centre’s scientific strategy, involve multi-disciplinary science, and involve cross-institutional supervisory teams and thesis committees.

Our MBPhD programme builds on the expertise of the UCL MBPhD programme and due to our CATP success, QMUL have now established their own programme that will also contribute MBPhDs in the future.

Students have a customised training plan, optional research placements and are supported by their supervision team, a thesis committee that offers independent advice and mentorship, the CoL Centre postgraduate training manager and a postgraduate research tutor at their host university.

We have established an inclusive and supportive research culture led by our leadership team, supervisors and their senior laboratory staff to ensure students’ dignity and work-life balance are respected and our students feel comfortable with the work and expectations that are set.

These principles are enshrined in a supervisory agreement signed by both student and supervisor and monitored by regular catch-up meetings with the postgraduate training manager.

Each trainee has at least one clinical academic as a supervisor or thesis committee member, to support their ongoing clinical development and long-term career planning.

We have a strong network of clinical academics who hold independent grant funding and lead internationally-recognised teams in the CoL Centre, including the new clinical training lead (Attard), that will support students with mentorship and career guidance and serve as role models.

Attard will be supported by our founding clinical training lead (Lemoine) with oversight by the Executive Board and Director (Enver).

Together with non-clinical PhDs, we have established a cohort of excellence that promotes student-led development, enabling our CATP students to thrive through extensive networking opportunities and scientific meetings, outreach programmes and exchange of ideas.

In partnership with our biomedical research centres and local NIHR training programmes, we have established new support for trainees post-PhD to remain research active and develop their scientific careers.

We will closely monitor diversity metrics, PhD completion rates, student academic outputs, student satisfaction surveys and medium to long-term academic career outcomes.

Overall, the CATP is an important part of our strategy to deliver the scientific goals of our Centre, which recently received renewed funding from CRUK.

We believe that our CATP will contribute to the next generation of clinical academics who will play important roles in the long-term delivery of CRUK’s strategy to beat cancer.