Category: Design and innovation

Tackling Stroke with University Innovation

By guest blogger and Imperial alumnus Margaux Lesaffre

Stroke is the silent killer; there are no clear symptoms until people realise they can’t talk, move or even swallow. Annually, over 5 million deaths worldwide are caused by strokes, ranking this disease in the first ten leading cause of deaths.  In developed countries, the incidence of stroke is dropping, but the outcome is still severe with some stroke victims left permanently disabled.

So what’s the way forward?

University researchers have developed remarkable innovations that could deliver significantly more reliable diagnostics and treatment. This blog looks at different ways university research can tackle this insidious disease.

Innovations in biotechnology

By Student Challenges Competition runner up Nicolas Kylilis

Nicolas won the £2,500 prize money last year for his inventive idea for a new platform technology called DaPHNI for developing point-of-care medical diagnostic devices. The DaPHNI platform has the potential to have a large, multifaceted positive impact on global health both in developed countries, at healthcare centres, or as home diagnostic kits, as well as in developing countries.

The problem

In the past few decades, innovations in biotechnology have brought to the market small portable and affordable medical diagnostic devices that people can use to monitor their health, the so-called biosensors. Some examples of biosensor devices such as the pregnancy test strip and the blood glucose meter are widely known and used by the public.

Next Generation: Global Health Innovators

John Chetwood, winner of  the 2012 IGHI Student Challenges Competition tells us how he has put the £2000 prize money to good use.

Detecting a Silent Cancer

With the hepatologists at Imperial College London, I had been in rural Thailand investigating urinary biomarkers of ‘cholangiocarcinoma’ or simply put, cancer of the bile ducts. Though cholangiocarcinoma is thankfully rare in developed countries, it is showing worrying increases in incidence, and has shown little improvement in survival over the last 15 years.  There is still little hope of cure unless detected early and nearly everyone who develops this cancer will die from it.