On Friday, the EPSRC announced the recipients of its new Healthcare Technologies Challenge Awards. These Awards recognize innovative projects which promise to improve healthcare diagnosis and treatment, across a wide spread of issues.
The award winners will share in a £9 million fund allocated to support a cohort of next generation research leaders to establish a personal programme of high quality, creative, and multidisciplinary research across the EPSRC portfolio, and to build and grow their research groups. The researchers will work with clinicians, companies and charities to speed up the process of translation and clinical adoption of their innovations, and to help them design their research so the barriers to its implementation in healthcare are minimal.
Life Sciences Minister George Freeman MP said: “From fertility diagnostics to disease detection, these award-winning projects – supported by Government’s £6bn annual science budget – are great examples of how interdisciplinary collaboration can achieve game-changing results. By linking patients, technologists, clinicians and scientists, new tools and techniques to improve healthcare can be truly innovative which is why the UK is a world leader in life sciences.”
EPSRC’s Chief Executive, Professor Philip Nelson, said: “These Healthcare Technologies Challenge Award winners are our future research leaders who will be instrumental in ensuring the UK can meet the 21st century healthcare needs and thrive as a healthy nation.”
Professor Jerusalem’s described the importance of his group’s work: NeuroPulse will build the foundations of a new generation of disruptive and enabling healthcare technologies by exploring and using the interaction between the mechanical vibrational properties of neurons – a specialised cell in the body that transmits nerve impulses – and their electrophysiological functions. This endeavour is set to benefit the medical community in the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury and Spinal Cord Injury, both major, global public health issues, while providing new avenues for non-invasive electrophysiological control, such as pain management.
For more information on this exciting award or Professor Jerusalem’s research, please see here or refer to his Departmental page.
