WWRC Research

Research consists of a basic element, aimed at understanding the nature and causes of diseases. This then enables clinical research to develop new ways of treating patients. Put simply, clinical research is the study of health and illness in individuals. By conducting this type of research, those in the field of health-care science can develop a deeper understanding of various diseases. Typically, clinical research entails a thorough examination of people, data, and/or tissue samples. This allows those involved to find new methods of detection, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention. Ultimately, the goal is to increase medical knowledge and improve patient care. 

Due to the importance of clinical research, doctors and scientists must perform a systematic investigation when collecting information. There are specific protocols that must be followed, such as obtaining regulatory approvals and taking steps to ensure legal and ethical compliance.   

Genes, behaviours (such as exercise and eating habits), and environment are all factors that affect a person’s health. The goal of precision health is to protect health by measuring these factors and acting on them. Interventions can be tailored to each individual, rather than using the same approach for everyone.

Precision medicine, also called personalized medicine, helps your doctor find your unique disease risks and treatments that will work best for individual people. Precision health is broader - it includes precision medicine but also approaches that occur outside the setting of a doctor’s office or hospital, such as disease prevention and health promotion activities. Precision health involves approaches that everyone can do on their own to protect their health as well as steps that public health can take (sometimes called “precision public health”), such as healthy eating and exercise for example. 

Clinical research is a branch of healthcare science that determines the safety and effectiveness of medications, devices, diagnostic products and treatment regimens intended for human use. These may be used for prevention, treatment, diagnosis or for relieving symptoms of a disease.

From the derived term “from bench to bedside”, translational research is the process whereby ideas and discoveries from emerging research projects are translated into products of therapeutic value for human patient benefit. Where discoveries in “basic science” improve our understanding of a disease, the aim of translational research is to move basic science into practice, to improve human health through the development of drugs, therapies, techniques and medical devices.

Scientists make ground-breaking discoveries in the lab every day - but translating these findings to improve human health is not a quick or simple task. It requires numerous steps to take the work through from pre-clinical, to clinical trials, to approved use in the clinic. Translational research projects are designed to speed up this process, as well as ensuring that when the clinical trial stage is reached, the treatment has the highest possibility of success in the aspect of safety and efficacy.   

Translational research often focusses on conditions where there is an unmet medical need; this is defined as a condition where there is currently no adequate diagnosis, treatment or prevention method.

Therefore, translational research is exceptionally important in terms of helping patients with rare conditions reach an accurate diagnosis, as well as providing those that suffer from medical conditions with lack of effective treatment, experience a better quality of life through developing new suitable treatments.

Medical registries have been defined as an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves a predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purpose(s). In brief, a patient registry is a collection - for one or more purposes - of standardized information about a group of patients who share a condition or experience. The use of “patient” in patient registries is often used to distinguish the focus of the data set on health information.

Medical registries provide highly reliable data, challenged hierarchically only by randomized controlled trials. Although registries have been used in several fields of medicine for more than a century and a half, their key role is frequently overlooked and poorly recognized. Medical registries have evolved from calculating basic epidemiological data (incidence, prevalence, mortality) to diverse applications in disease prevention, early diagnosis and screening programs, treatment response, health care planning, decision making and disease control programs.