Oxford has always been a pioneer when it comes to clinical trials, and you can read about the history of our successes here

For all the modern advances that have taken place in medicine, a great many treatments in use today owe their success to early medical trials conducted in Oxford.

Take, for instance, penicillin. in February 1941, a doctor at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, called Charles Fletcher, initiated the first clinical trials of penicillin. The first patient, a 43-year-old policeman with a serious infection, was treated with penicillin regularly over four days, and within 24 hours he was greatly improved. Though he eventually died just over a month later, of the next seriously ill patients, four made full recoveries thanks to penicillin. This evidence was enough to convince the authorities that penicillin was useful, which is how it came to be used amongst soldiers during the second world war – and latterly much more widely.