It’s Women at Imperial Week, an opportunity for us to celebrate some of the fantastic females who help keep our Institute brimming with brilliance.
To mark the occasion, in honour of International Women’s Day, we spoke with a handful of women from across IGHI’s Centres to learn more about what they do, what makes them tick, and the females who inspire them the most.
By Nate Macabuag, 2018 winner of IGHI’s Student Challenges Competition.
Hey, I’m Nate, co-founder of Mitt, our prosthetic wearables start-up. We’re tackling the barriers that come with limb loss by building accessible, easy-to-use prosthetic limbs for people across the world. (more…)
By Rachel Dunscombe, CEO, NHS Digital Academy
Standing in the Royal Society on the 16th of April waiting for the participants to arrive was both surreal and exciting. Surreal because of the rapid journey our wonderful team had taken to make the programme happen – this had become a reality so quickly. Exciting because I couldn’t wait to get started – this programme is important for the system and for me something I am hugely committed to.
The Digital Academy operational team, of which I am a part, are all keen to ensure that this programme is as grounded in digital leaders’ practice as much as possible rather than being too high end academic. It is a difficult juggling act given that folk will be coming away with a postgraduate diploma from Imperial College London. We worked hard to strike this balance in the run up to the first three day residential.
I set the tone for day one by conducting a poll of the audience. We found out who was in the room and that out of 104 participants there were 53 doctors – the majority by a long way. I do question why more people from other professional groups didn’t apply for the first programme? It would be great to see more nurses, for example, applying for future cohorts given that they represent the majority of the workforce. That said, we do have six nurses on the current cohort along with four pharmacists, a dentist and a social care digital specialist.
Everyone was super enthusiastic and really got stuck in to the icebreaker session. We immediately started to find common ground and get motivated about being a huge movement of like-minded digital leaders. #digitalleaders soon began trending on Twitter followed later by #cohort1. (more…)
By Kitty Liao and Abellona U of Ideabatic, IGHI’s 2017 Student Challenges Competition winners
So much has happened since we won the Student Challenges Competition last year. The prize from the competition has been very helpful for us to secure our UK patent. Following that, we have recently submitted our global patent.
By IGHI guest blogger, Chris Bird, PG student from the MSC in Health Policy at the Centre for Health Policy and Project Manager in the System Engagement Programme at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)
At a recent conference I was lucky to listen to a guest lecture by Dr Kevin Fong. Kevin has a long standing interest in human space exploration and space medicine and has worked with NASA’s Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston. He’s travelled the world to meet medical innovators and has produced interesting documentaries for television showing the extreme scenarios in which healthcare and technology can be applied to further human survival.
Listening to Kevin inspired me to go away and discover more about how innovations in battlefield medicine have gone on to benefit wider society.
Such are the advances in emergency medicine on the battlefield in recent years that many soldiers who previously would have succumbed to their injuries are now often going on to be so-called ‘unexpected survivors’ as found by the National Audit Office’s assessment into the quality of treatment on military operations. In many cases they survive with complex and highly specialised needs.
One of the most common injuries resulting from recent military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan has been limb loss. Many soldiers have become multiple amputees as a result of maiming from improvised explosive devices. In the past such survivors would have been constrained by their physical condition and the limits of technology available to give them some form of mobility.
Today, advances in prosthetic limb replacements mean that science fiction has become science fact. Devices that 20 years ago were only the stuff of science fiction movies are now benefiting veterans in real life today. Specialist providers of prosthetics and orthotics such as the Hanger Clinic in the US are at the forefront of efforts to meld the best practices of engineering, science and healthcare to devise prosthetic solutions that empower their patients.
Recent innovations to prosthetics include gyrostabilisers to provide better balance and support. These devices known as microprocessor-controlled prosthetic knees (MPKs) have an in-built battery powered computer which senses the mode and level of activity the user is undertaking and adjusts swing and stance and the vacuum that grips the user’s residual limb to match this activity. People using an MPK have reported improved individual mobility and independence and greater freedom to undertake activities. Prince Harry’s Invictus Games have served to highlight the incredible achievements that these veterans, supported by advanced prosthetics such as MPKs can realise as a result of these advances in emergency medicine, technology, physical and mental rehabilitation.
So how do we get those innovations out to people in wider society, but living with similar disabilities who might benefit from their application?
In the UK National Health Service (NHS), its specialised commissioning team are now overseeing the provision of MPK devices to restore quality of life to around 500 people per year. Resource stewardship in an era of stretched finances requires policy makers to ensure that money in new innovations is invested wisely. For these new treatments, complex decisions have to be made about which ones represent the best value taxpayers and clinical effectiveness for patients. NHS England has found the MPKs to be a cost-effective innovation for the NHS’s specialised services given the range of improvements that can deliver to a patient’s overall health and wellbeing.
NHS England’s Specialised Commissioning through Evaluation (CtE) Programme (with a budget of £25m) is testing an approach to evaluating further potentially promising specialised treatments, for which there is currently insufficient evidence to supporting routine commissioning (funding) within the NHS.
For each CtE scheme, new data is collected within a formal evaluation programme, undertaken with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), potentially leading to the development of a new or revised national clinical commissioning policy for future access.
Amongst promising new innovations currently at the CtE’s data-gathering stage is the Second Sight Argus II Retinal Prosthesis – ‘bionic eyes’ to tackle inherited blindness where an implant in the patient’s retina is linked to a camera mounted on a pair of glasses. This camera sends wireless signals direct to the nerves which control sight and are then ‘decoded’ by the brain as flashes of light.
It’s often the case that science fiction forecasts what the next technological innovation will be. Looking at the latest offerings in cinema – from the artificially intelligent synthetic beings of Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner franchises to the advanced medical diagnostics and regenerative medicine of Star Trek, the future of medicine looks an exciting place to be.
At the recent Expo, NHS Medical Director Sir Bruce Keogh noted exciting new evidence that artificial intelligence will have the capability to read x-rays within four years. It continues to be the role of health service policy makers today to ensure the conditions are in place for these innovations to be tested and if found to meet value and outcomes thresholds, realised for the benefit all those whose lives may be enhanced by them in our healthcare systems.
Follow Chris Bird on Twitter – @TheChrisBirdy
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.
Focus on Innovative Rehabilitation
When a blood vessel bursts in the brain, or when a blockage forms, parts of the brain may stop receiving oxygen. This can cause brain cells to die. In the regions affected by cell death, the ability to control primary body functions, including speech and muscle control, can be lost.
The aftermath of a stroke depends on which part of the brain is affected and the extent of damage. This is why a stroke is a time-critical emergency. Even if better prevention can ultimately reduce the incidence of strokes, it cannot be completely eliminated. With the consequences of this disease being so severe, a number of academic researchers are focusing their energy on stroke rehabilitation. (more…)
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.
Biosensor devices work by detecting a biomarker molecule in a patient’s sample (blood, urine etc.) that corresponds to a medical condition and reports the results to the user of the device. For example, the blood glucose meter measures the concentration of glucose – the biomarker – in a diabetic patient’s blood to help him plan meals and medication. This technology allows for diagnostic testing to take place at the comfort of patient’s home and resulted in the dramatic rise in the standard of care for diabetic patients.
Healthcare reforms being pursued by many western countries focus on providing better and more convenient access to healthcare for all patients. This, in combination with an increased interest on a more patient-centric healthcare system creates the incentives for the development of more biosensor tests to diagnose even more medical conditions. However, for the medical conditions where the diagnostic need is the greatest – an example being cancer prognosis or after-treatment monitoring – current biosensor technology is inadequate. This is because such medical conditions have complex diagnostic profiles of many biomarker signatures that current biosensor technology proves inadequate. As a result, diagnosis can only take place in hospitals and research centers with sophisticated equipment and associated with large costs and thus not available to many. (more…)
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. This situation is particularly bleak when you consider parts of rural South-East Asia where mainly due to parasitic infection the incidence surpasses 300/100,000, yet there are significant limitations on any kind of investigation or treatment.
In my final year as a medical student at Imperial College, my efforts were directed towards developing a diagnostic and screening urinary dipstick (similar to the kind currently used for pregnancy) which would lead to an accurate, cost-effective, transportable, non-perishable, and culturally permissible way to screen for this cancer in these communities. Early diagnosis of this cancer offers the only realistic chance of cure and with better understanding of how this cancer develops there was also the tangible possibility of new and better treatments. (more…)