Imperial College: £11M awarded for new medical engineering centre

Grant

Imperial College has been awarded £11 million to fund a Centre of Excellence in Medical Engineering focusing on osteoarthritis, as one of four such centres to be funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

Four interdisciplinary research teams, at King’s College London and Leeds and Oxford universities, along with Imperial, will receive a combined total of £41 million over the next five years.

The funding will help to develop integrated teams of clinicians, biomedical scientists and engineers. Commenting on the award, Ross Ethier of Imperial College said, “Our centre will develop technologies to improve the lives of patients with osteoarthritis. For example, we will create the next generation of hip and knee replacement implants that will last longer and require less invasive surgery to fit.”

Ethier said tissue engineering will also contribute hugely in this area, using patients’ own cells to grow new cartilage for osteoarthritic knees. “A better understanding of the disease will also lead to new technologies to diagnose and treat osteoarthritis at a much earlier stage,” he said.