Patients in Manchester could gain faster access to promising healthcare technologies through a new partnership between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT). The initiative establishes a Manchester Sandbox, enabling innovative technologies to be tested in real NHS settings and generating evidence on their safety, effectiveness and impact in day-to-day clinical practice. The program will initially focus on AI-enabled medical devices, such as tools designed to identify patients at higher risk of complications from long-term conditions so that they can receive earlier support and treatment.
The MHRA said the initiative is intended to address a key challenge in healthcare innovation: technologies may demonstrate potential during development, but their performance in real-world clinical environments needs to be understood before they can be more widely adopted. The sandbox will bring regulators, healthcare providers and innovators together earlier in the development process, using proportionate oversight and defined safeguards while technologies are deployed with patients and clinicians. Lawrence Tallon, the MHRA Chief Executive, said: “AI and other emerging technologies have enormous potential to improve patient care. The challenge is understanding how they work in practice and where they can make the biggest difference.”
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Mark Cubbon, the MFT Chief Executive, said: “Patients should benefit from innovation as quickly as possible, but they should never have to choose between access and safety. This partnership brings together key partners earlier in the process so we can understand what works and how new technologies perform in real healthcare settings.” The program will also examine regulatory approaches that can respond to the changing needs of healthcare, with learning shared across the NHS to support wider adoption of technologies shown to work.
MFT and the MHRA will convene a roundtable later this year involving regulators, healthcare providers, innovators, researchers and patient and public representatives. The MHRA will also invite medical device developers to express interest in participating in the next phase. This approach mirrors the historic shift in drug regulation that moved trials from university labs into community hospitals; by embedding testing directly in NHS infrastructure, the Manchester Sandbox aims to bypass the slow, often disconnected approval process that currently separates promising research from actual patient care.
