The Advanced Therapies Wales Clinical Expertise Forum, the UK’s first model of its kind for Advanced Therapies, was endorsed by ATW Programme Board in December 2024 to embed multidisciplinary clinical leadership within the Advanced Therapies Wales programme.

Its remit includes service design, workforce planning, business case development, and infrastructure preparation, ensuring alignment with regulatory standards such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the Joint Accreditation Committee ISCT-Europe & EBMT (JACIE), and the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway (ILAP) across Wales.

Speciality Leads roles have been identified for the following areas, to be funded by the ATW Programme for sessional time for an initial 12-month duration:

  • Solid tumour oncology
  • Haemato-oncology
  • Apheresis
  • Nursing
  • Regulatory capability and expansion of clinical capacity

Additionally, ATW and HEIW are co-developing a long-term workforce model, providing funding for a Clinical Lead and a Digital Technologist role, with the clinical lead set for workforce development to join the Forum.

This Clinical Expertise Forum will be overseen by Professor Liam Gray as the ATW Clinical Lead. The distributed leadership model ensures resilience and responsiveness. This structure positions ATW to act as a convenor of clinical expertise across Wales, supporting both national delivery and UK-wide collaboration through the ATTC network, whilst supporting the substantive organisations to benefit from the investment in roles, and exposure and learning that the clinical leads can bring back into their employing organisations.