Building the gut microbiome

Bacteria hugely impact many aspects of our lives, including health, agriculture, industry, water treatment services, and the climate. Often, they live together in densely packed communities, where they can strongly interact with each other. In particular, the 'bacterial communities' living in our digestive tract are now known to be essential for our health and well-being, such as protecting us from harmful bacteria, improving our nutrition, and training our immune systems. Critically, changes in the community composition and structure can lead to chronic and life-threatening diseases. Therefore, we must understand how these bacteria interact with each other and ourselves if we want to unlock further health benefits available to us. However, it is extremely difficult to study and understand these bacterial communities, especially at the tiny scales at which they naturally occur. New methods are urgently needed to build simplified bacterial communities and their hosts, capturing the complex arrangements and interactions of different bacteria found within us. My goal is to build new tractable models - using 3D printing and flow systems - to study how the composition and structure of the community and the host determine how bacterial communities persist over time, and importantly, if they thrive or perish. I have chosen to work in this research area because I believe I can vastly improve our understanding of the link between the host, community structure, and community function by building simplified microbiome models. Importantly, the technologies and understanding I develop throughout this proposal will not only benefit human microbiome research, but microbial communities found throughout the environment.

AI-guided Prostate Biopsy

The AMS Professorship will enable Prof. Tse's team to clinically validate next-generation interventional technology for affordable image fusion with a small footprint and translate it to clinical practice. Zion’s planned project, a collaboration between his lab and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, will aim to improve freehand transperineal prostate cancer biopsy by developing an integrated 3D MRI-US image fusion system built upon state-of-the-art AI techniques. This system will help clinicians precisely navigate needles to lesions in the prostate for more effective diagnosis and treatment.

Talin dependent mechanical imprinting as driver for cardiac disease progression

Scalable Manufacturing of Single-Crystal Perovskite Optical and Electronic Devices: Follow-On

In this project, we will develop technologies for scalable manufacturing of single-crystal perovskite optical and Electronic Devices.

Mapping populations to patients: designing optimal ablation therapy for atrial fibrillation through simulation and deep learning of digital twin

We will combine biophysical simulation and deep learning methods with a longitudinal digital twin approach to optimise risk prediction and choice of therapy for atrial fibrillation. We aim to move predictions from the acute response to the long-term response; from the average patient to an individual patient; from standard treatments to any treatment approach; from small patient cohorts to large virtual trials; and from long simulation times to short clinical timescales.

Integrated Human-Augmented Robotics and Intelligent Sensing Platform for Precision Viticulture

This project aims to revolutionize the way high-value horticultural crops such as grapes, berries, and other fruits are grown by developing and implementing a precision farming ecosystem.

Engineered Recombinant Strategies to Organogel Design for Food Product Formulations

Tomo-SAXS: Imaging full-field molecular-to-macroscale biophysics of fibrous tissues

This project will combine X-ray phase-contrast tomographic imaging and small-angle X-ray scattering to develop a path-breaking new technique - TomoSAXS – for the multiscale biophysics of tissues. We will develop advanced reconstruction algorithms to generate full-field 3D images of molecular to macroscale soft tissue structure, using the intervertebral disc as a prototypical organ.

G1F1 Application of a new high throughput platform for validation of mechanosensitive miRNA

Designing motile and chemotactic protocells and exploit cellular collective behaviours

ProNaGen: Engineering of Recombinant Protein Nanosheet-Based Bioemulsions for Next Generation Bioprocessing and Biomanufacturing

Single crystal perovskite fibre

In this project, we will explore the application of single-crystal perovskite fibres.

Human synovium-cartilage organ-chip for personalised surgical screening

Scientists at Queen Mary University of London are creating a human knee-on-a-chip device to understand how arthritis develops in individual patients and to test treatment strategies. The so-called organ-on-a-chip will consist of living cells taken from the knee joints of patients with osteoarthritis. The cells from patient’s cartilage and other tissues within the knee, will be grown within the laboratory in a carefully bioengineering organ-on-a-chip and used to understand which patients respond well to treatment. This will ultimately allow clinicians to optimise therapies to individual patients in an approach known as precision medicine or personalised medicine.

MRI-guided Focal Laser Ablation for Prostate Cancer Treatment

Prostate cancer is one of the most common malignancies in males and has now become the second leading cause of cancer mortality. Prostate cancer diagnosis has increased from 3.9% to 8.2% of the population in the past decade. Approximately 52,300 new cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed in the United Kingdom every year, which is more than 140 every day. In this study, a robotic platform used for MRI-guided prostate therapy, including both biopsy and ablation, will be developed and validated. Compared with all the listed MR-safe robot platforms, the presented design will have a compact size, allowing it to be placed inside the scanner quickly. Moreover, the use of pneumatic stepper actuators will reduce the affection of EMI generated by piezoelectric motors and all the other parts are made of plastic, making the whole system to be MR safe.

Wearable sensor for vascular access home monitoring

Kidney Research UK Dialysis Competition

Microbiome-Bone Chip

Remote Vital Signs Monitor for Infection Control or Fall Prevention

Recent miniaturisation developments in electronic systems have resulted in a wearable technology boom. This in turn has led to an increase in both vital sign monitoring and research into non-invasive and continuous monitoring methods. Various studies have shown the feasibility of using seismocardiogram (SCG) in heart rate variation (HRV) analysis and diagnostic purposes. This study aims to build upon the research done on SCG through development of a novel, real time Android based system which can calculate the heart rate and the respiratory rate of patients.

British Heart Foundation – 4 year Doctoral Training Programme

Led by Professors Amrita Ahluwalia and Tim Warner and involving 23 named researchers, the BHF DTP Programme provides cohort training leading to a PhD in cardiovascular research.

Engineering Circadian Biology into Human Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Organ-on-a-Chip models

Dual targeting and triggered delivery of biomacromolecules from layer-by-layer decorated gas filled

Organ-on-a-chip model of breast cancer bone metastases

Background A common site for invasive ductal carcinomas (IDC) metastasis is bone, affecting about 70% of patients. Once metastasis to bone has occurred the five-year survival rate drops from 99% to 29%.  How breast cancer metastasises to bone is poorly understood, partly because of the lack of appropriate models. Organ-on-a-chip technology is …

Cost-effective Lung Biopsy with Intraoperative Electrical Impedance Sensing and Artificial Intelligence Navigation

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women. More than one million lung cancer cases are diagnosed worldwide each year. It has the highest death rate among all types of cancers in the United States and worldwide. Early detection with higher yield tissue diagnosis as well as an accurate localization during lung interventions may help reduce the impact, death rate, and overall population cost of lung cancer. Accurate and timely clinical information facilitates patient-specific therapy decisions, resulting improved clinical outcomes. Engineering approaches that are low cost and also Accurate localization of biopsy devices alongside of verification that biopsy needle is within solid abnormal tissue (and not normal non-target lung) can signi?cantly improve the accuracy of the diagnosis, which further helps clinicians make the optimal decision via a lung treatment decision tree.

KTP with Lucideon: Cell testing to assist development of novel biomaterials

The aim of this programme is to transfer and embed knowledge of in vitro cell testing from QMUL to Lucideon to enable them to offer clients integrated physico-chemical and biological characterisation of materials used in medical devices & implants to improve the safety & efficacy of healthcare treatments.

Production of a human growth plate organ-chip model of skeletal development

This award aims to develop a human cell-based skeletal growth plate organ-on-a-chip to replace the use of rodents in some studies of development, ageing and disease

Body-Worn Sensor for Point-of-Care Vascular Access Monitoring

In this project, we will develop a body-worn sensor for cardiovascular monitoring, particularly to address a long-standing clinical challenge in vascular access health surveillance.

Organ-on-a-chip Centre of Excellence

The QM-Emulate Organs-on-Chips Centre provides access to Emulate’s Organs-on-Chips technology to enable researchers to develop organ models of their design to expedite their experiments. Expert staff are on hand to support with training and use of the platform as well as pushing forward new organ-on-a-chip research projects led by Knight and Screen. The Centre also provides opportunities for collaboration with Emulate and support for commercialisation and translational impact. The centre is part of the new Centre for Predictive in vitro Models (CPM). Visit the web site to see full details of this and the new Emulate centre: https://www.cpm.qmul.ac.uk/emulate/

The regulation of mechanosensing in healthy and atherosclerotic VSMC

Vascular smooth muscle cellsplay a central role in the onset and progression of many cardiovascular diseases, from atherosclerosis to vascular injury, where their migration, matrix secretion, or degradation functions are deregulated. Here we are investigating how the phenotypic switch is regulated through physical/mechanical stimuli.