Background
The Kingshill Research Centre in Swindon was established in 1994 by AWP Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Roger Bullock, who had a keen interest in identifying and testing new treatments for dementia through clinical drug trials.
Over the years the centre contributed to over 80 dementia trials involving more than 1000 participants. Crucially, Kingshill Research Centre was involved in the testing of all four of the original licensed treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, which are still being used for treating dementia today. As a result of this, Kingshill Research Centre had a strong national and international reputation, as a centre of excellence for commercial dementia research.
After the retirement of Dr Bullock in 2017, Dr Sabari Muthukrishnan (AWP Consultant Psychiatrist) took over as the Lead Clinician for the unit, supporting the centre until its closure in March 2024. Dr Sabari’s leadership meant the centre could continue offering patients important access to dementia commercial trials, otherwise not available to them through the NHS.
As drug development has progressed, commercial dementia trials have become more complex, using more advanced technology; including assessment of biomarkers, as well as the use of functional neuroimaging. There are tighter criteria for patients to be registered onto these trials. This has meant a decline in offers to patients and the number of people accessing clinical trials.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic had a serious impact on commercial research across the UK, and dementia commercial research continues to struggle to recover to post-pandemic levels. Due to the significant and on-going overspend of the Kingshill Research Centre and the need for AWP to ensure services are sustainable, AWP made the difficult decision to close Kingshill to new patients in the summer of 2023, with closure of the unit completed by the end of March 2024.
Fortunately, all the patients who were in clinical trials at the time of closure were able to successfully transfer to our local Clinical Trials Unit in Bath, known as RICE. We hope to have an ongoing collaborative working relationship with RICE for dementia research. We are grateful to the dedicated staff at Kingshill who worked in the unit for many years and supported the smooth transfer of patients to RICE, as well as the efficient closure of the unit.
AWP remains committed to providing patients with opportunities to take part in research and we will continue this through the AWP Research and Development department.
If you are a patient with a memory problem or carer of someone with a memory problem and would like to know more about the research opportunities available to you, please click on the 'Take part in research' button below or contact us using the phone number or email address supplied on this webpage.
Take part in research
To find out about the research opportunities being offered through AWP Research and Development, please click the 'Take part in research' button below.