The NIHR Diabetes Research Network (NIHR DRN) was established in 2005 to provide a world-class infrastructure to support clinical research in diabetes and to remove barriers to its conduct.
Since its inception, it has worked with primary and secondary care centres throughout England and has been supported by the Department of Health to conduct high quality clinical research in both the commercial and academic sectors. More than 200,000 patients have been recruited into NIHR DRN studies. A major emphasis is placed on recruitment to time and to target.
The co-ordinating centre for the network is a consortium between Imperial College London, based at the International Centre for Circulatory Health, and the Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism. This co-ordinating centre manages eight Local Research Networks (LRNs) which provide geographical coverage of the country.
Each LRN is centrally resourced to provide the infrastructure to support randomised controlled clinical trials and other high quality studies in diabetes. This support ranges from publicising studies and helping with R&D approval applications to the accurate and rapid assessment of study feasibility and timely recruitment.
The network has developed a balanced portfolio of trials and other well designed studies that cover all aspects of diabetes research and more information about the benefits that working with the network can give your study, can be found on their website: http://public.ukcrn.org.uk/search/