Oxford University plans ‘personalised healthcare for life’
25 June 2009
A new £8m Oxford University research centre will develop personalised healthcare to help treat conditions such as diabetes and cancer in everyone from babies to the elderly, it was announced today.
The centre is funded by The Wellcome Trust and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and is one of four new UK Centres of Excellence in Medical Engineering aiming to transform the future of healthcare.
The Oxford centre will investigate such areas as medical imaging to study why some babies fail to grow properly in the womb, how mobile phone technology can help young people with diabetes and asthma manage their own treatment (with a special focus on the developing world), how targeted drug delivery can improve survival rates for liver cancer patients, and how computer modelling can help deliver better treatment for people who have suffered a stroke.
‘Much of the 20th Century was devoted to developing treatments that are broadly effective in most people. However, it has become clear that long-term conditions such as diabetes, asthma and cancer are best managed by taking into account how the individual is responding to their particular therapy,’ said Professor Lionel Tarassenko, Director of Oxford’s Institute of Biomedical Engineering, part of the Department of Engineering Science, which will house the new centre.
‘We will be developing techniques and strategies to precisely measure individuals’ response to their condition and therapies, and use those measurements to adjust and improve the way the person is being treated. This approach could have a real impact on survival rates and improve the quality of life for people living with long-term conditions, from birth to old age,’ he added.
Mobile phone technology pioneered at Oxford offers a way for those with such long-term conditions as diabetes to monitor their health on the move, receive personalised advice, and adjust their treatment accordingly. As 70 per cent of the 3.3 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world today are in developing countries the next decade gives the centre a unique opportunity to develop its mobile phone-based telehealth technology for the developing world.
Cancer affects people of all ages and some 40,000 people each year are diagnosed with primary or secondary liver cancer in the UK. Researchers at the centre will work towards an ultrasound-based drug delivery system that would vary drug dosage ‘on demand’ depending on how a particular patient’s tumour is responding to treatment, as assessed by the same wearable ultrasound array which activates the anti-cancer particles.
We still don’t fully understand why some small babies have problems after birth whilst others thrive. Oxford researchers will study babies in the womb and during their first year of life to discover the relationship between the growth of key organs such as the brain and liver in the foetus and a baby’s health after birth.
In stroke patients, where blood flow to a part of the brain has been affected, modelling how their brain will react to different forms of surgical intervention would help doctors decide what approach to take. Researchers at the centre will work on such personalised modelling as well as developing surgical implants (stents) that can be tailored to fit a particular patient’s aneurysm.
The aim in every area is to move away from the ‘one size fits all’ approach towards one focused on the problems and needs of individuals.
For more information contact Professor Lionel Tarassenko on email lionel@robots.ox.ac.uk
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