Wellcome News 60 editorial

Biology and medicine are powerful disciplines in their own right, but they do not stand alone. Each interacts with, and is dependent upon, a variety of other disciplines, and we should always look to enhance these links - for they can stimulate new ideas, approaches and innovations.

Chemistry, for example, is intimately linked to biology, explaining the properties of complex molecules and being central to drug development. Meanwhile, physics has brought us brain imaging for research and diagnostics and, on a grand scale, the Diamond synchrotron in Oxfordshire: a massive particle accelerator that is being used to solve the structures of proteins and other materials.

Away from the 'classic' science areas, computing has perhaps brought the most profound shifts in biomedical research over the last two decades - and bioinformatics has emerged as a discipline in its own right. Every day, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute produces the equivalent of one human genome's worth of DNA sequence data; without computing power on an industrial scale, the capture, storage, analysis and sharing of these terabytes of data would be impossible. Parallel developments in networks are bringing us electronic patient records, which will not only help doctors to look after their patients but also be powerful resources for researchers looking to understand our long-term health.

The discipline that has had and will continue to have a huge impact on healthcare is that of engineering. There is a long history of collaboration between doctors and engineers, bringing us health transforming developments such as hip and knee replacements, pacemakers, dialysis machines and video laryngoscopes, and today it is the fastest-growing area of engineering.

An exemplar collaboration was between Glasgow obstetricians Ian Donald and John McVicar and engineer Tom Brown, who in the 1950s launched the field of prenatal diagnosis by ultrasound scanning. Donald had come across radar and sonar while serving as a medical officer in World War II, and led the development of a prototype scanner that fused industrial metal flaw detector technology with Meccano sprockets and chains and a borrowed hospital bed table. Their 1958 Lancet paper, 'Investigation of abdominal masses by pulsed ultrasound', which demonstrated the utility of the technique, noted that their findings "encourage great efforts to refine our technique". Such refinements have brought ultrasound scanning to the forefront of antenatal care.

It is this spirit of innovation that underpins our newly awarded funding to four Centres of Excellence in Medical Engineering. At these centres, engineers and medical scientists are using the latest technologies to tackle major unmet needs in medicine. The Imperial College London team is developing small, tailored artificial knee implants and tissue-engineered stem cells to repair joints damaged by osteoarthritis. The Leeds centre is taking a wider view of the ageing body and is working on bioregenerative scaffolds to repair cartilage, bone, heart valves and blood vessels. The Oxford team's work includes liver cancer treatments that are encapsulated in nanoparticles and are guided to their target in the body and released using ultrasound.

And finally, King's College London is developing improved imaging tools for detecting arrhythmia and robotic guides to aid keyhole surgery procedures.

The Health Innovation Challenge Fund is another exciting initiative that we hope will bring many new products, technologies and interventions into routine healthcare. This collaboration with the Department of Health launched its first themed call for proposals in July, under the banner of 'advancing genetic discoveries into clinical practice' and with funding of up to £20 million. Given the tremendous pace of developments arising from the application of genome sequencing to improved understanding of human variation in health and disease, this initiative is both timely and important.

Mark Walport
Director of the Wellcome Trust