Barts

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Overview

Our Centre

Barts ECMC is a centre of excellence that will facilitate the translation of basic scientific discovery into the delivery of novel treatments to patients with cancer.

It had extended both scopes of the existing Barts Centre, by encompassing new therapeutic approaches and tumour types, and the number of patients with cancer to whom innovative trials can be offered to over 9,000 a year.

The Barts ECMC aims:

To deliver excellence in translational cancer research
To conduct clinical trials to the highest ethical and scientific standards
To strengthen and expand the evidence base for the management of malignant disease
To improve patient care and expand access to novel clinical trials and innovative treatments for cancer

Organisations affiliated with Barts ECMC:

Contact the Centre Manager:

bci-cecmmanager@qmul.ac.uk
+44 (0) 207 882 8498

Address

Centre for Experimental Cancer Medicine
Barts Cancer Institute
University of London
Lower Ground Floor, Old Anatomy Building
Charterhouse Square
London EC1M 6BQ

Team Members

Professor Peter Schmid

Centre Co-Lead

p.schmid@qmul.ac.uk

+44 (0) 207 882 3444

Professor Schmid is internationally recognized for his research and education leadership in breast cancer. He is the clinical director of the Breast Cancer Centre and an honorary consultant medical oncologist at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. He was appointed in 2013 as Chair in Cancer Medicine at Barts Cancer Institute (BCI), Queen Mary University, London. Professor Schmid is also Lead of the Centre of Experimental Cancer Medicine at Barts Cancer Institute, overseeing the conduct of early phase trials at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and BCI, with a particular interest in Immunotherapy, innovative trial designs, and circulating biomarkers. He leads the academic breast cancer programme at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and BCI.

Professor Tom Powles

Co-Lead

Expertise:

Adult

thomas.powles@bartsandthelondon.nhs.uk

Professor Thomas Powles is the Chair of Barts Cancer Centre, London, one of the UK’s largest Cancer Centres.  He leads the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and Biomedical Research Cancer Grants at Barts/QMUL. He has led 23 randomised cancer trials, including studies that resulted in multiple EMA and FDA approvals. He has also led clinical and high-impact translational science projects, leading to over 20 NEJM/Nature/Nature Med articles. He has an H-index of over 100 and has given plenary presentations at all the major cancer meetings. He co-leads the Uromigos podcast, which has 400,000 listens, and European Guidelines for GU cancer. He is editor-in-chief of the Annals of Oncology Journal. In 2023 he was selected a Nature’s 10 global scientist and in 2024 TIME magazine's 100 Healthcare List.

Scientific & Operational Team:

Dr Pete Hall

Lead for PPIE and Cancer Research Delivery Manager

peter.hall12@nhs.net

Dr Adam Januszewski

Deputy Cancer Research Delivery Manager

adam.januszewski@nhs.net

Charlotte Ackerman

Clinical Trial Operations Manager (Investigator Initiated Trials Unit)

c.ackerman@qmul.ac.uk

Grace Ma

Centre Manager

bci-cecmmanager@qmul.ac.uk

Laura Vosper

Quality Assurance Manager

bci-cecmqa@qmul.ac.uk

Cheryl Lawrence

Senior Research Pharmacist

c.lawrence@qmul.ac.uk

Garima Priyadarshini

Senior Trial Statistician

g.priyadarshini@qmul.ac.uk

Cancer Research Delivery Group Administrator

bartsecmc@qmul.ac.uk

Dr Bernadett Szabados

Lead for Surgical Oncology

bernadett.szabados@nhs.net

Professor Marco Gerlinger

Lead for GI and Translational Science Lead

m.gerlinger@qmul.ac.uk

Adult Expertise

Treatment Modalities

Biologics

Immunotherapy

Gene therapy

Radiotherapy

Small Molecules

Surgery

Facilities/Translational Research

Barts Centre for Experimental Cancer Medicine (CECM), is responsible for the set-up, management, data collection and analysis of early phase oncology trials sponsored by either Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) or Barts Health NHS Trust (BH), at a national and international level. The CECM is part of Barts ECMC, a network that assists in the delivery of early-phase cancer studies across the UK. Barts CECM has strength in clinical implementation utilising innovative trial designs, such as biomarker-driven clinical trials with multi-arm adaptive design or using serial pre-treatment and on-treatment biopsies in the perioperative setting. Includes a substantial track record of biomarker-guided neoadjuvant or window-of-opportunity trials in many cancers, including breast and bladder cancers.

Barts ECMC has a very active early phase clinical trial portfolio with specific strengths in cancer novel therapies (including novel combination immunotherapy strategies, ADC trials, vaccination strategies, as well as cell based/CAR-T cell therapy programmes). As our clinical cancer service at Barts Health is limited to adult oncology (with paediatric patients being treated at other centres), our ECMC is exclusively working on research projects in adults.

Our centre is strongly committed to providing equal access to trial opportunities to all patients, irrespective of age, ethnicity or socio-economic background. Barts ECMC is based in north-east London and serves one of the most ethnically and socio-economically diverse populations in the United Kingdom. Our centre’s approach places PPIE and EDI at the centre of policy and governance structures that enables us to deliver better care through more inclusive research. Ensuring our staff represent our communities we serve with an inclusive work culture has been an important step to understanding and extending inclusivity to our clinical trial participants.

2025 Statistics – Research Portfolio

12 open investigator-initiated trials with 7 Chief Investigators
Trial portfolio of >130 open trials
9 Barts Chief Investigators of open global trials
3 new tumour groups (Gastrointestinal (GI), Head & Neck and Surgical Oncology)

Case Study

Case Studies

New drug combination doubles survival for people with bladder cancer

Results from a clinical trial carried out by researchers at Barts Health NHS Trust and Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, show that a new combination of drugs doubles overall survival for patients with bladder cancer that has spread (metastatic bladder cancer).

The findings show that giving people with metastatic bladder cancer enfortumab vedotin (an antibody drug conjugate) and pembrolizumab (an immunotherapy drug) can stop their disease from getting worse and helps them live twice as long compared to those given just chemotherapy.

Life expectancy for people with metastatic bladder cancer is just one year, and the treatment they are given, chemotherapy, hasn’t changed in 40 years. This new trial, called EV302, involved nearly 900 people aimed to change this and to develop the first new treatment for bladder cancer that has spread in nearly four decades.

The team found that the 442 people given this new combination of drugs (enfortumab vedotin and pembrolizumab) lived nearly twice as long compared to the 444 people given chemotherapy (31.5 vs 16 months). In addition, the researchers showed that the risk of death was 53% lower in those given the combination, which was also associated with better disease control rates. And encouragingly, side effects from the drug combination were very similar to those experienced by people given chemotherapy.

Professor Tom Powles, Professor of Urology Cancer at Barts Cancer Institute and the director of Barts Cancer Centre, led the trial at Barts Health. Speaking on the results, he said:

“We’ve long known that we need to improve people’s chances of surviving bladder cancer. This study has achieved that in a dramatic manner.
"We’ve shown that combining these two drugs helped people live twice as long compared to those given standard chemotherapy, with unprecedented responses. There is new hope in bladder cancer, and I can’t thank those who took part in the trial enough for doing so.”

Read the paper here.

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Scientific & Operational Team: