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Ghana

The bespoke Multiscale Metrology Suite, will combine powerful leading-edge detectors for measuring nanomaterial properties and transform the measurement of health nanotechnologies. We will build a modular system combining the latest in flow field fractionation technologies with mass spectrometry, Raman and light scattering detectors for the physical and chemical measurement of nanomaterial properties. The requested equipment will enable world-leading researchers at the University of Strathclyde, other UK academic institutions, and industry to accelerate their research into new technologies for healthcare applications and remain competitive in the global race for delivering new innovations in health. Moreover, this equipment will generate new research avenues and partnership opportunities that will create a step-change in the physical and chemical analytical capability and infrastructure for UK health nanotechnology research. This leading-edge suite will ultimately reduce the time and costs associated with delivering new diagnostics and drug treatments, improving quality of life and delivering much needed lifesaving drugs to patients. Strong partnerships with industry partners and government facilities will ensure that this national facility will remain globally-competitive and deliver innovations.

Maintaining sustainable productivity of pharmaceutical research and development is one of the most significant challenges faced by this major UK industry. Pre-clinical models for testing drug safety and efficacy are poorly predictive of human response, making our ability to translate new scientific discovery to impactful therapy extremely costly and time consuming. Organ-chips are small, bioengineered devices which replicate important aspects of human health and disease, and thus provide the predictivity of human response required to transform therapeutic delivery. The organ-chip industry is one of the fastest growing worldwide, as the transformative potential of organ-chip technology is realised. For the UK to ensure ongoing growth and productivity of the pharmaceutical industry, it is imperative we deliver a workforce able to advance this technology and bring it into use, to drive successful healthcare innovation. COaCT sets a transformative vision to bring together the full stakeholder community in organ-chip technology, to collectively develop and deliver a training programme designed to equip graduates with the skills and knowledge required to be the next generation of leaders in organ-chip technology and advance the technology into regulatory use. We focus on three core areas: 1. delivering the technical skills required to design, manufacture and advance organ-chip models: Organ-chip models are microfluidic devices, in which the physics of managing organ growth and drug delivery are different to those in standard cell cultures. We provide training to ensure students understand how to work with a wide range of commercial organ-chip systems and build their own devices, appreciating the specific biosensing, nano-patterning, mechanobiology, microfluidics and microfabrication requirement of organ-chip systems, and the rationale and decision making associated with selecting different approaches, so they are fully prepared to work across the sector in future roles. 2. ensuring students are equipped with the broader understanding of the societal implications of the technology, and the regulatory and policy changes which will be necessary to ensure impactful delivery. There is clear potential for organ-chip approaches to revolutionise therapeutic discovery, but for the technology to achieve its potential, it is imperative that the field fully considers and responds to the societal and regulatory environment as it evolves and develops, thus our future leaders must be fully trained in this area. 3. providing a focus on transferable skills training, to help students develop into effective future leaders in this field: The rapid growth of organ-chip technology offers exciting future opportunities for researchers shaping the field. To be effective in driving the field, it is important graduates possess the transferable skills to lead teams and companies designing or implementing organ-chip technology, and are able to communicate effectively with the broad range of stakeholders involved. Our stakeholder community brings together the pharmaceutical and organ-chip industries, varied medicine-related regulatory bodies, policy groups, and charities, all with a strong commitment to deliver organ-chip technology. The COaCT investigator team have been leading the efforts of this stakeholder community to coordinate and drive organ-chip research for the last 5 years, though leadership of the UK organ-on-a-chip technologies network. Indeed, the ideas for the CDT scope and training remit have been developed collectively through those discussion panels and workshops.

Medical imaging has made major contributions to healthcare, by providing noninvasive diagnostics, guidance, and unparalleled monitoring of treatment and understanding of disease. A suite of multimodal imaging modalities is nowadays available, and scanner hardware technology continues to advance, with high-field, hybrid, real-time and hand-held imaging further pushing on technological boundaries; furthermore, new developments of contrast agents and radioactive tracers open exciting new avenues in designing more targeted molecular imaging probes. Conventionally, the individual imaging components of probes and contrast mechanisms, acquisition and reconstruction, and analysis and interpretation are addressed separately. This however, is creating unnecessary silos between otherwise highly synergistic disciplines, which our current EPSRC CDT in Medical Imaging at King's College London and Imperial College London has already started to successfully challenge. Our new CDT will push this even further by bridging the different imaging disciplines and clinical applications, with the interdisciplinary research based on complementary collaborations and new research directions that would not have been possible five years ago. Through a comprehensive, integrated training programme in Smart Medical Imaging we will train the next generation of medical imaging researchers that is needed to reach the full potential of medical imaging through so-called "smart" imaging technologies. To achieve this ambitious goal we have developed four new Scientific Themes which are synergistically interlinked: AI-enabled Imaging, Smart Imaging Probes, Emerging Imaging and Affordable Imaging. This is complemented by a dedicated 1+3 training programme, with a new MRes in Healthcare Technologies at King's as the foundation year, strong industry links in form of industry placements, careers mentoring and workshops, entrepreneurship training, and opportunities in engaging with international training programmes and academic labs to become part of a wider cohort. Cohort building, Responsible Research & Innovation, Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, and Public Engagement will be firmly embedded in this programme. Students graduating from this CDT will have acquired a broad set of scientific and transferable skills that will enable them to work across the different medical imaging sub-disciplines, gaining a high employability over wider sectors.