Funding: Medical engineering
27 March 2008
With this new call, the Trust aims to encourage physical scientists - such as engineers, or chemical, mathematical or computational scientists - to form partnerships with clinicians and basic biomedical researchers to develop new medical technologies.
While pharmaceuticals play a major role in treating disease, medical devices, machines, tools or software are also often crucial drivers of healthcare advances.
Through its translation research funding, the Trust has already invested in the development of a number of such ‘tools’. These include new signal analysis tools for defibrillators and pulse oximeters, biosensors, a pain reduction device for people with chronic low back pain, ultrasonic brain-imaging software that can more accurately identify tumours, and a hand-held video laryngoscope.
The Trust is now looking to help foster world-class research in this area by creating and supporting centres of excellence at UK-based institutions and consortia that already have a critical mass of relevant or potential projects.
These centres will house multidisciplinary teams of researchers - whose expertise spans the entire spectrum of physical and life sciences - working together to develop non-pharmaceutical healthcare outputs in specific therapeutic areas. These might include, for example, biomedical engineering, chemistry, digital health, imaging software, control software for radiation therapy, medical physics, nanotechnology, optics, photonics, robotics, prosthetics, or synthetic proteins or polymers.
Wellcome Trust support for these centres will include training fellowships, which are intended to start creating a new generation of PhD and postdoc scientists with a deep and practical understanding of multidisciplinary research and the translation of that research into clinical practice.
More widely, the Trust hopes these centres will become models demonstrating all the necessary steps involved in research and developing new therapeutics - from basic biomedical research to proof of concept, intellectual property, product development, attracting venture capital, clinical trials and dealing with regulatory bodies.