Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a respiratory disease which affects approximately 3 million people in the UK and 64 million in the world. This chronic condition affects mostly people over 45 and is characterised by a progressive decline of lung function. COPD is currently the fourth leading cause of death in the world, although the World Health Organisation (WHO) predicts it will become the third by 2030. The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) estimates that the total direct cost of COPD to the NHS is over £800 million- out of which over £300 million correspond to hospitalisations. The Department of Health reports that, added to this, the cost associated to loss of productivity is in the order of £3.8 billion per year. Overall, the general worldwide consensus on COPD is that "it will become one of the major health challenges over the next few decades". Thus, it is widely acknowledged that anything that improves management and effectiveness of treatment will not just improve patients' quality of life, but also result on savings from: 1- Hospitalisations (average cost per admission estimated to be around £2,000 per patient, this being one of the most costly inpatient conditions in the NHS); 2- Potential visits to GPs; 3- Associated loss of productivity due to work absenteeism. The main reason for hospitalisations associated with COPD are exacerbations. Severe COPD exacerbations cause one in eight of all emergency admissions in hospitals, this is the second largest cause of emergency admissions in the UK. Mild and moderate exacerbations can be managed outside the hospital but if they are not identified promptly they may progress to breathlessness and in some patients to respiratory failure. A significant proportion of these exacerbations will require in-patient treatment. A significant proportion of these exacerbations will require in-patient treatment. Added to the negative financial consequences of not managing exacerbations properly, they reduce the quality of life and increase the risk of death- the more the worse the exacerbation progresses to be; and also increased exacerbations severity irreversibly speeds disease progression. The purpose of this research project is to create a novel wearable wireless technology- compose of a sensing unit of approximately the size of a pound coin to be worn by the patient in the neck, and a mobile phone application- that will be able to monitor COPD patients continuously, and automatically provide early detection of potential exacerbations, in order to inform patients and/or their doctors, so that these can be treated promptly to minimise their likelihood of progression to higher levels of severity.

There is a necessity to speed up the process of design, optimization and evaluation of formulation for biomedical applications. Such a process is even more crucial when it comes to the engineering novel nanometer-sized particles that can deliver therapeutic agents across the different barrier targeting only the damaged sites. Today such effort collectively known as Nanomedicine, is revolutionizing traditional therapy and enabling completely new therapeutic and diagnostic approaches. Nanomedicine is a multifaceted discipline that involves physicists, chemists, engineers, biologists and clinicians. This interdisciplinary nature is possibly nanomedicine greatest strength and greatest weakness at the same time. Indeed while this allows a more complete understanding of the different physico-chemical aspects as well as the biological implications, often the methodologies and the approaches are substantially different across the different disciplines hindering the validation and the fast translation of the final results. Herein we propose a rigorous approach of synthesis and pre-clincial evaluation of many nanoparticles for the delivery of theraupetic genetic materials. These will be screened developing and employing state-of-the-art biological evaluations adapted for nanoparticles. We plan to screen for thousands of formulation and aiming to identify few that will have a tremendous impact in both cancer therapy and motoneuron-degenerative disorders.

In the majority of current medical practice, diagnostic imaging and therapeutic procedures are intrinsically separate, often involving entirely different teams of experts. Whilst this takes advantage of the highly developed skills of narrow specialisms, it can have significant drawbacks: it is resource intensive; lack of real-time monitoring increases the risk of ineffective treatment or collateral damage; long waiting times between diagnosis and treatment and/or treatment and follow up are psychologically and often physically detrimental to patients due to disease progression; and there is increased risk of patients not attending or not complying with treatment regimes. The aim of the proposed research programme is to build a world leading multi-disciplinary team to develop new methods and technologies that will truly integrate diagnostic and therapeutic procedures and produce a step change in clinical practice. The research activity will be focused in three areas:-Developing new types of agent for targeted drug delivery which will enable clinicians to monitor the placement, transport and controlled release of drugs and other therapeutic material. -Understanding the mechanisms by which these agents interact with cells and tissue to enable the design of safer, more reliable delivery strategies-Designing technology that will not only enable tracking of therapeutic material but also active manipulation and stimulation.The outcomes of the research will directly benefit patients, clinicians and other healthcare workers by providing new, more efficient and effective procedures. This will in turn yield economic benefits, directly through new products and services for the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries, and by reducing demand on healthcare resources. To realise these outcomes, a key feature of the research strategy will be to maintain close working relationships with both clinical and industrial partners to maintain the focus of the work on the most relevant research challenges and to identify and access the most appropriate and efficient routes for translation.The research will also lead to new discoveries and the development of a range of experimental and theoretical tools which will be of direct benefit to the research community. Another important aspect of the programme will thus be training of the research team to communicate effectively across disciplinary boundaries as well as through wider public engagement activities. Through building on the proposed pilot studies and collaborations with academics, clinicians and industry a research project portfolio will be constructed which will sustain the activity of the group beyond 5 years in order to fully realise the integration of diagnostic imaging and therapy from concept to clinic.

Gas-liquid foams are ubiquitous in our daily life and in industry. Applications range from food, consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, polymers and ceramics to fire-fighting, enhanced oil recovery, and mineral particle transport. Recently, applications have also emerged in the medical field, e.g. foam sclerotherapy of varicose veins, and expanding polymer foam for treating brain aneurysms. Thus, foams are crucial to a wide range of industries and contribute considerably to the world economy. For example, by 2018 the global market will be worth $61.9 billion for polyurethane foam, $7.9 billion for shaving foam, and $74 billion for ice cream. The chocolate market will reach $98.3 billion in 2016, and a considerable part of it is due to aerated products (e.g. mousse). Foams are challenging complex fluids which are used for a variety of reasons including their light weight, complex microstructure, rheology, and transience, many aspects of which are not well understood and, thus, not well predicted by current models. A wide gap therefore exists between the complexity of foam phenomena and the present state of knowledge, which makes foam design and control in commercial applications more art than science. In particular, in many industrial processes foams are forced to flow through intricate passages, into vessels with narrow complex cross-sections or through nozzles. Examples include flow of aerated confectionary in narrow channels and complex moulds, filling of cavities with insulation foam, flow of foamed cement slurries in narrow oil-well annuli, filling of hollow aerofoil sections with polyurethane foam to make aerodynamic tethers for communication and geoengineering applications, and production of pre-insulated pipes for district heating. These flows are typified by contractions and expansions which generate complex phenomena that can have important effects on foam structure and flow, and can lead to dramatic instabilities and morphological transformations with serious practical implications for foam sustainability during flow and processing. Here, the flow characteristics of the foam at bubble scale are important, but the topological changes incurred and their effects on the rheology and flow of the foam are poorly understood. This proposal seeks to address this lack of understanding by studying experimentally, using a range of advanced diagnostic techniques, and via theory and computer simulation a number of fundamental aspects related to the flow, stability and behaviour of three-dimensional foams through narrow channels containing a variety of complex geometries. The flow of aqueous foams as well as setting polymer foams with formulations of varying degrees of complexity will be experimentally studied. We will develop bubble-scale simulations with arbitrary liquid fractions spanning the whole range from dry to wet, to cover foams of industrial relevance. The wide range of experimental information and data to be generated in this project will allow these simulations to be guided and critically tested and, conversely, the simulations will underpin our engineering theory of the behaviour of foam flows in complex geometries. This basic knowledge, from theory, modelling and experiment, will give a step improvement in fundamental science, and will assist designers and manufacturers of foam products, as well as designers and users of foam generating or processing equipment. More specifically, the practical aim of the project is to develop predictive tools as an aid to industrial practitioners, to describe the structural and dynamical properties of foams in terms of formulation properties and flow parameters, based on the knowledge gained from the experimental and modelling work. We will also work with our industrial partners to help them improve their understanding of the fundamental science which underpins their particular foam flow applications and, thus, enable them to enhance them.

As minimally invasive surgery is being adopted in a wide range of surgical specialties, there is a growing trend in precision surgery, focussing on early malignancies with minimally invasive intervention and greater consideration on patient recovery and quality of life. This requires the development of sophisticated micro-instruments integrated with imaging, sensing, and robotic assistance for micro-surgical tasks. This facilitates management of increasingly small lesions in more remote locations with complex anatomical surroundings. The proposed programme grant seeks to harness different strands of engineering and clinical developments in micro-robotics for precision surgery to establish platform technologies in: 1) micro-fabrication and actuation; 2) micro-manipulation and cooperative robotic control; 3) in vivo microscopic imaging and sensing; 4) intra-operative vision and navigation; and 5) endoluminal platform development. By using endoluminal micro-surgical intervention for gastrointestinal, cardiovascular, lung and breast cancer as the exemplars, we aim to establish a strong technological platform with extensive industrial and wider academic collaboration to support seamless translational research and surgical innovation that are unique internationally.