St Bartholomew's Hospital

About: St Bartholomew's Hospital is a healthcare organization based out in London, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Cancer. The organization has 11054 authors who have published 13229 publications receiving 501102 citations. The organization is also known as: St. Bartholomew's Hospital & The Royal Hospital of St Bartholomew.

Volunteers or victims: patients' views of randomised cancer clinical trials

Abstract: Randomised clinical trials are essential for the objective evaluation of different treatment strategies in cancer. However, in the field of oncology, very few of the eligible patients are entered into trials, and most treatments have only been tested on a small percentage of patients. For doctors, a major deterrent to participating in trials is the lack of resources--particularly time, but often also the local facilities. This report suggests that patients themselves are willing to take part in clinical research, and are attracted by being treated by a doctor with a specialist interest in the disease and encouraged by the possibility that their progress will be monitored closely. With the recent NHS changes, it is timely for the Department of Health and other national health departments to consider carefully what can be done to ensure that no new treatments are adopted without effective evaluation. This will require departments of health to identify and implement ways to facilitate accrual of appropriate numbers of patients onto research protocols (whether non-randomised phase I or phase II studies or large, multicentre phase III trials) over short time periods.

Simplified procedures for applying the polymerase chain reaction to routinely fixed paraffin wax sections.

Abstract: The polymerase chain reaction was applied to the analysis of DNA contained in archival paraffin wax embedded material. DNA suitable for the reaction was obtained from these tissues by simple extraction methods, without previous dewaxing of tissue sections. When compared with unfixed material, the reaction efficiency was compromised, so that an increased number of amplification cycles were required to produce equivalent amounts of amplified product. This in turn led to an increase in amplification artefacts, which can be minimised by a simple modification of the standard reaction. Amplification of relatively large DNA fragments was not always successful, and it seems prudent to bear this in mind when designing oligonucleotide primers which are to be used for the amplification of archival material. The efficiency of the procedure can be improved by dividing the amplification cycles into two parts: this reduces the amount of reagent needed, is relatively simple and inexpensive, and can be performed in one working day.