Robotic clothing and ‘listening’ for cancer among new projects receiving UKRI funding

Five new research projects aim to transform healthcare through the development and application of revolutionary new technologies; from robotic clothing and ‘listening’ for signs of cancer.

Supported by a £118 million investment, including £54 million from the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), they include:

• Developing tech such as robotic clothing that ‘puts itself on and takes itself off’ and wearable devices to prevent falls, to address the needs of the UK’s 6.7 million people in the UK with age or disability-related mobility issues
• Creating low-cost, portable devices to detect the early signs of cancer by ‘listening’ for soundwaves and using optical tools - from Professor Danail Stoyanov, Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)
• Developing a new approach for the administration of drugs to treat conditions ranging from high blood pressure to diabetes and asthma, which would require a single dose which would last for weeks or even months
• Speeding up and reducing the time required to bring new drugs to market by testing using microdosing, an approach which sees a tiny amount of a drug delivered to a small part of the body
• Overcoming barriers to the use of mesenchymal stem cells to help tissue regeneration to repair broken bones and in chemotherapy, where they can help to regenerate healthy bone marrow

EPSRC Executive Chair Professor Charlotte Deane said:

“The five new hubs bring together a wealth of expertise from across academia, industry and charities to improve population health, transform disease prediction and diagnosis, and accelerate the development of new interventions.They represent an exciting range of adventurous techniques and approaches that have great potential to improving the lives of millions of people here in the UK and across the world.”

Each hub will deliver a world-leading research programme focused on advancing and developing novel engineering and physical sciences research.

To ensure their research has maximum impact each hub will work with patients, people with lived experience and health professionals.

They will work with a wide range of partners including the NHS, charities such as Age UK and Cancer Research UK, pharmaceutical companies and small and medium-sized enterprises, with 131 partners providing £64 million of cash and in-kind support in addition to the £54 million EPSRC investment.

UCL's Healthcare Hub summary

Optical and Acoustic Imaging for Surgical and Interventional Sciences (OASIS) Hub

Led by: Professor Danail Stoyanov, from UCL Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences (WEISS)

EPSRC funding: £11 million

Partner funding (cash and in-kind): £6.1 million

Every year around 375,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in the UK and more than 50% will undergo surgical interventions. However, the imaging tools we currently use to identify the earliest signs of cancer and aid surgery are limited to replicating human vision which cannot always distinguish important details in images. This means that signs of cancer can be missed in surveillance and diagnosis, and in treatment an inability to remove all cancerous tissue and a likelihood of a need for further surgery. The OASIS hub aims to develop low-cost, portable devices to identify and visualise cancer using optical, acoustic and photoacoustic imaging. Bringing together partners from across academia, industry and the NHS to accelerate the development and clinical use of these technologies, it will pave the way for clinical trials and establish new datasets with the aim of making effective and less invasive interventions available to everyone in the UK. 

Other Healthcare Hub summaries

The VIVO Hub for Enhanced Independent Living

Led by: Professor Jonathan Rossiter, University of Bristol

EPSRC funding: £11 million

Partner funding (cash and in-kind): £847,000

More than 6.7 million people in the UK have age or disability-related mobility issues, leading to a loss of independence and reliance on stretched health and care services, a problem that will only increase due to the UK’s ageing population. Working with the NHS, charities and care providers, the hub aims to develop the healthcare technologies required to directly address the mobility and independence issues of this large population where it’s needed – on their bodies, in their homes and in the communities and environments where they live and socialise. These will include robotic clothing that ‘puts itself on and takes itself off’; wearable devices to combat orthostatic hypertension, therefore preventing falls; wearable robotic assistance systems using digital monitoring to support sitting-to-stand, stair climbing and safe standing; and systems such as lightweight, on-body energy storage and power delivery systems to allow full independence outside of the home while still using these new tools

MAINSTREAM research and partnership hub for health technologies in Manufacturing Stem Cells

Led by: Professor Matthew Dalby, University of Glasgow

EPSRC funding: £11 million

Partner funding (cash and in-kind): £1.5 million

Mesenchymal stromal or stem cells (MSCs) are adult stem cells that can turn into bone, cartilage, ligament, tendon and fat-forming cells, with far-reaching potential for tissue regeneration to repair broken bones, for example. They can be used as a drug to prevent transplant rejection, while their role in the development of blood cancers means they have potential to complement chemotherapy in regenerating healthy bone marrow and looking after normal blood cells provided by bone marrow transplants. Despite their massive potential in healthcare provision and the fact that the first MSC-based clinical trial took place more than 25 years ago, MSC therapies are still not commonly used. This is due to the difficulty in growing them outside of the body, meaning only relatively few can be grown from each donor which keeps the price high and prevents production from being scaled up. MAINSTREAM aims to address this problem through the development of materials that tell MSCs to retain their key characteristics in an artificial environment, allowing them to be manufacturing in large numbers. It will lead the development of novel materials that act in the same way as the places in the body the cells grow to allow us to produce enough cells for cellular therapies and identify how to scale-up the technologies using approaches such as 3D printing needed to allow future medicines to be manufactured affordably and sustainably.

National Hub for Advanced Long-acting Therapeutics (HALo)

Led by: Professor Steve Rannard, University of Liverpool

EPSRC funding: £11 million

Partner funding (cash and in-kind): £49.1 million

People are well known to struggle with taking regular medicines both for prevention of disease or treatment of acute or chronic conditions. Taking medication once or several times a day can become a burden, and medicines cannot deliver their intended benefits if doses are missed. This can lead to complications ranging from a lack of efficacy to pathogen resistance.  An alternative approach is Long-Acting Therapeutics (LATs), which sees a single administered dose delivering the right amount of drug required for weeks or even months. This approach has been proven to be successful in the management of HIV and mental health conditions, with potential to protect against malaria also recently demonstrated. LATs have the potential to simplify the administration of drugs, improve clinical outcomes and reduce the costs of healthcare provision. The HALo team will bring academia together with pharmaceutical companies to understand the physical science underpinning successful LAT medicines, create proof-of-concept medicines for diseases without LAT options, and drive the UK pathway from research to clinically available therapies.

Research and Partnership Hub in Microscale Science and Technology to Accelerate Therapeutic Innovation (MicroTex)

Led by: Professor Ian Underwood, University of Edinburgh

EPSRC funding: £11 million

Partner funding (cash and in-kind): £16.6 million

Lung infection and inflammation is one of the world's leading causes of illness and death, but the discovery of potential new therapies and proving the efficacy of these in humans is costly and time-consuming, typically taking more than ten years and costing more than $1 billion. A potential solution exists in the form of Intra Target Microdosing (ITM), an approach which involves administering tiny amounts of multiple drugs to a microscopically small part of the lung, bypassing animal models of disease, and measuring the therapeutic benefit in diseased tissues with no wider risk to the subject. ITM has been used to identify promising therapies for solid tumours and can quickly and efficiently reject poor candidate drugs and raise confidence in more promising drugs at an early stage, thus dramatically increasing the efficiency of drug development producing substantial reductions in time, resource and cost. The use of ITM for lung infection and inflammation has the potential to transform therapy development and brings a significant technological challenge and the project aims to create, develop, optimise, and test the techniques that will deliver, measure and sample precise microdoses at specific locations in the lung.