Current research funding in the Centre for Bioengineering
£13,765,664

Centre for Bioengineering

Funded Research Projects

The following are current funded research projects taking place within the research centre:

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


Principal Investigator: Caroline RONEY
Funding source: UKRI Medical Research Council
Start: 01-11-2022  /  End: 31-10-2026
Amount: £1,224,259

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.

Talin dependent mechanical imprinting as driver for cardiac disease progression


Principal Investigator: Thomas ISKRATSCH
Funding source: BHF British Heart Foundation
Start: 01-09-2023  /  End: 31-08-2026
Amount: £718,167

Engineered Recombinant Strategies to Organogel Design for Food Product Formulations


Principal Investigator: Julien GAUTROT
Funding source: Motif Food Works Inc
Start: 01-09-2022  /  End: 31-08-2026
Amount: £32,500

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


Principal Investigator: Himadri GUPTA
Funding source: EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Start: 01-01-2021  /  End: 25-10-2025
Amount: £451,556

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


Principal Investigator: Rob KRAMS
Co-investigator(s): Gleb SUKHORUKOV
Funding source: BHF British Heart Foundation
Start: 03-10-2022  /  End: 02-10-2025
Amount: £117,986

Designing motile and chemotactic protocells and exploit cellular collective behaviours


Principal Investigator: Claudia CONTINI
Funding source: BBSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Start: 02-01-2023  /  End: 30-09-2025
Amount: £371,059

Versus Arthritis
Human synovium-cartilage organ-chip for personalised surgical screening


Principal Investigator: Timothy HOPKINS
Co-investigator(s): Martin KNIGHT
Funding source: AR-UK Versus Arthritis
Start: 01-04-2022  /  End: 31-03-2025
Amount: £311,203

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.

AI-guided Prostate Biopsy
AI-guided Prostate Biopsy


Principal Investigator: Zion TSE
Funding source: AMS Academy of Medical Sciences
Start: 31-03-2023  /  End: 30-03-2025
Amount: £497,258

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.

MRI-guided Focal Laser Ablation for Prostate Cancer Treatment
MRI-guided Focal Laser Ablation for Prostate Cancer Treatment


Principal Investigator: Zion TSE
Funding source:
Start: 01-03-2020  /  End: 28-02-2025

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.

KRUK Dialysis Competition
Wearable sensor for vascular access home monitoring


Principal Investigator: Lei SU
Co-investigator(s): Haixue YAN
Funding source: Kidney Research UK
Start: 01-01-2023  /  End: 31-12-2024
Amount: £30,000

Kidney Research UK Dialysis Competition

Remote Vital Signs Monitor for Infection Control or Fall Prevention
Remote Vital Signs Monitor for Infection Control or Fall Prevention


Principal Investigator: Zion TSE
Funding source:
Start: 01-11-2022  /  End: 31-10-2024

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.

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


Principal Investigator: David LEE
Funding source: BBSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Start: 01-02-2022  /  End: 31-08-2024
Amount: £201,874

British Heart Foundation – 4 year Doctoral Training Programme


Principal Investigator: Amrita Ahluwalia
Co-investigator(s): David LEE
Funding source: British Heart Foundation
Start: 01-09-2017  /  End: 31-08-2024
Amount: £2,300,000

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.

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


Principal Investigator: Gleb SUKHORUKOV
Funding source: Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Start: 01-07-2022  /  End: 01-07-2024
Amount: £292,164

Proposed Emulate bone metastasis organ-chip
Organ-on-a-chip model of breast cancer bone metastases


Principal Investigator: Martin KNIGHT
Co-investigator(s):
Funding source: CR-UK Cancer Research UK
Start: 01-01-2021  /  End: 31-05-2024
Amount: £268,711

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 …

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


Principal Investigator: Karin HING
Co-investigator(s): Simon RAWLINSON
Funding source: Innovate UK
Start: 17-02-2021  /  End: 17-02-2024
Amount: £249,854

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.

Project group - Dr Joanne Nolan, Dr Tim Hopkins, Prof Martion Knight (PI) and Dr Angus Wann (CoI)
Production of a human growth plate organ-chip model of skeletal development


Principal Investigator: Martin KNIGHT
Co-investigator(s): Timothy HOPKINS and Joanne NOLAN
Funding source: National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) and BBSRC
Start: 01-01-2023  /  End: 01-01-2024
Amount: £201,240

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


Principal Investigator: Lei SU
Funding source: EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Start: 01-10-2021  /  End: 31-12-2023
Amount: £378,651

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.

An Emulate microfluidic organ-chip
Organ-on-a-chip Centre of Excellence


Principal Investigator: Martin KNIGHT
Co-investigator(s): Hazel SCREEN and
Funding source: Emulate Inc.
Start: 20-08-2019  /  End: 31-12-2023
Amount: £525,375

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
The regulation of mechanosensing in healthy and atherosclerotic VSMC


Principal Investigator: Thomas ISKRATSCH
Funding source: BHF British Heart Foundation
Start: 01-12-2020  /  End: 30-11-2023
Amount: £238,021

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.

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


Principal Investigator: Zion TSE
Funding source: NIH National Institutes of Health - USA
Start: 01-11-2022  /  End: 31-10-2023
Amount: £25,611

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.

A Biophysical Model of Gum Reintegration on enamel


Principal Investigator: Julien GAUTROT
Funding source: GSK GlaxoSmithKline UK Ltd
Start: 01-10-2019  /  End: 30-09-2023
Amount: £32,000

Smartphone Application For Effective Prostate Cancer Screening With Machine Learning Enhanced PSA-density Measurement
Smartphone Application For Effective Prostate Cancer Screening With Machine Learning Enhanced PSA-density Measurement


Principal Investigator: Zion TSE
Funding source: CR-UK Cancer Research UK
Start: 25-06-2022  /  End: 30-09-2023
Amount: £66,298

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the commonest male cancer. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing is the first-line investigation used for referral to secondary care. Less than half of the 120,000 patients/year referred in the UK are ultimately diagnosed with PCa, highlighting the inefficiencies in the system, including the use of MRI as an expensive resource and biopsy as an invasive procedure. A common reason for raised PSA levels is benign gland overgrowth, and therefore PSA-density corrects for overgrowing gland volume, and therefore has utility for and indicating the presence of clinically significant cancer. Ultrasound (US) can measure gland volume provide such information, however, currently thisUS is currently performed in secondary care by specialized specialised practitioners, which increases costs and may delay cancer pathways. Making US volume calculations automated, cheap, and potentially available in primary care would avoid such limitations. The aims of this project are to develop a prototype device for automated US measurement of prostate volume and validate performance in a patient cohort.

Diagram showing omental metastasis in high grade serous ovarian cancer
Targeting the innate immune system in high grade serous ovarian cancer


Principal Investigator: Fran Balkwill
Co-investigator(s): Olive Pearce, Daniellea Loessner, Michel Lockley, R Manchanda, Quezada S and Martin KNIGHT
Funding source: CRUK
Start: 01-10-2018  /  End: 01-09-2023
Amount: £2,028,756

This 5-year CRUK Programme Grant is led by Prof Fran Balkwill from Barts Cancer Institute with a multidisciplinary team of co-investigators including Prof Martin Knight representing cancer bioengineering and mechanobiology.

Cells growing at the surface of oil droplets
Engineered Protein Nanosheets at Liquid-Liquid Interfaces for Stem Cell Expansion, Sorting and Tissue Engineering


Principal Investigator: Julien GAUTROT
Funding source: EU Commission - Horizon 2020
Start: 01-09-2018  /  End: 31-08-2023
Amount: £2,011,161

ProLiCell will design the biochemical and mechanical properties of extracellular matrix (ECM) protein nanosheets that can sustain the formation of adhesion protein complexes and support cell proliferation and culture on materials with very weak bulk mechanical properties (liquids).

MICA: Organ-on-a-chip models for safety testing of regenerative medicine products
MICA: Organ-on-a-chip models for safety testing of regenerative medicine products


Principal Investigator: Hazel SCREEN
Co-investigator(s): Martin KNIGHT
Funding source: MRC Medical Research Council
Start: 24-08-2020  /  End: 23-08-2023
Amount: £504,557

We are building novel organ-on-a-chip models of our musculoskeletal tissues, to learn more about disease processes and how this might be managed with regenerative medicine approaches

Fibrillar level mechanisms underlying transient change in pre-strain in cartilage: Under loading, loss of water molecules and structural collapse in the proteoglycan network lead a transient reduction of pre-strain (reduction in D-period) in the collagen
The mechanics of the collagen fibrillar network in ageing cartilage


Principal Investigator: Himadri GUPTA
Co-investigator(s): Martin KNIGHT
Funding source: Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
Start: 01-10-2017  /  End: 24-07-2023
Amount: £371,095

We seek to understand how age-related changes in articular cartilage link to alterations in its nanoscale mechanics – and eventually to joint breakdown. We use high-brilliance synchrotron X-ray scattering to track fibrillar deformation dynamics in the matrix (hydrated proteoglycans restrained by collagen fibrils), combined with proteomics to assess compositional changes. https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=BB%2FR003610%2F1

Wafer-Scale Manufacturing of Single-Crystal Perovskite Optoelectronics
Wafer-Scale Manufacturing of Single-Crystal Perovskite Optoelectronics


Principal Investigator: Lei SU
Funding source: EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Start: 05-07-2021  /  End: 04-07-2023
Amount: £316,308

In this project we aim to develop a scalable and high-yield manufacturing process for mass-producing single-crystal perovskite optoelectronics.