The Department of Clinical Pharmacology is part of the Medical Sciences Division, an academic division of the University of Oxford, and is led by Professor Leonard Seymour. The Department has a major research portfolio and also teaches the principles and practice of clinical pharmacology and therapeutics to medical students during their clinical training. The Department also runs a taught residential M.Sc in Experimental Therapeutics and co-hosts (with the Department of Pharmacology) a research M.Sc course in Medicinal Chemistry for Cancer.

The Department has a strong translational focus, seeking to apply new scientific ideas and insights in state-of-the-art medicines. Transfer of new agents from preclinical to clinical testing, with carefully designed clinical protocols allows measurement of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of the new agents and hypothesis-led testing of their mechanisms of action. Comprehensive clinical data can empower laboratory research in a process of iterative design and assessment of ever-improving new therapeutic agents. Clinical outcomes can also be correlated with genetic traits and polymorphisms of individual patients, helping us to predict which patients will respond best to specific drugs and thereby minimizing unnecessary treatments and maximizing patient benefit.

The Department has research groups focused on drug development for cancer, biomarkers, anticancer viruses, gene therapy, pharmacogenomics and studying adverse drug reactions and ion transport mechanisms, and has a large unit running clinical trials. It also provides advice on therapeutics to clinical staff within the Oxford hospitals, to the Health Authority, and to GPs in the Oxford region; this is done through direct contact and activities on the local Drug and Therapeutics Committee.

The Oxford Clinical Trials Research Unit (OCTRU) is part of the department, and is a UKCRN registered trials unit undertaking clinical trials in cancer treatment. OCTRU encompasses the collaborative work of the Centre for Statistics in Medicine (CSM) and the Oncology Clinical Trials Office (OCTO).

Information on the various research and clinical trials groups within the department can be found here.