A pioneering £20m Government drug trial project would improve Oxfordshire cancer patients' chances of surivival, according to a leading charity.

It looks likely that the Medical Oncology Unit at the Churchill Hospital in Headington, will be chosen as one of eight new centres of excellence for pioneering research.

Prof Adrian Harris, who leads the unit, has been invited to head a nationwide NHS Cancer Research Network (NCRN), which will ensure that clinical trials are doubled across the UK.

If the unit is chosen as one of the eight centres, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, which already funds pioneering research in the city, will play an important role in its future.

The charity's medical director, Dr John Toy, said: "The improved infrastructure for clinical research within the NHS through the NCRN will mean that cancer research organisations, like Imperial Cancer, will be able to run more and bigger trials and importantly, complete them more quickly.

"If we can double the number of patients entering clinical trials, we can give more cancer patients a greater chance by making potential new treatments available sooner.

"Patients taking part in clinical trials also tend to fair better."

Prof Harris, who will be in charge of the NCRN with Prof Peter Selby, in Leeds, said: "One of the problems is that only two per cent of patients have the opportunity to take part in new trials, because there are so few.

"This new project will help bring in more staff and also allow equality of access across the country.

As well as ploughing cash into existing trials at hospitals, ministers will finance the eight special Translational Centres, to make sure laboratory work is delivered to patients on the wards more quickly.

Prof Harris said: "These will be centres with special and new ideas to take to the bedside early on places which have a big strength in science, like the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, which already does innovative work.

"Oxford already has good research programmes, but now extra patients will be able to go into trials in the long term."