One of the biggest challenges facing the future of healthcare is enhancing early intervention in diagnosing and treating diseases in non-hospital environments; in the home, community clinic or local doctors’ surgery. Current medical practice is based around relatively late intervention, which with many diseases does not result in complete cure, but rather extends a patient’s life whilst, hopefully, maintaining quality of life.  The key to early intervention is the earliest possible detection of disease, and the swift identification of appropriate medical or surgical treatments.  The collaboration between Swansea University’s Schools of Medicine and Engineering, in partnership with industry and the Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, promises to apply Nanotechnology to Healthcare offering a unique opportunity to make a step change in the way healthcare is approached.

Technology, and particularly nanotechnology, has an increasingly important and strategic role to play in furthering the possibility of detecting and treating disease, and this has been central to the work of the University’s Multidisciplinary Nanotechnology Centre (MNC), established within the School of Engineering in 2001.  Coupled with developments in biomarker discovery in biomedical research at the School of Medicine’s Institute of Life Science (ILS), the challenges that can be overcome through nanotechnology have the potential to lead to novel devices, processes and sensors essential for the earliest detection of disease onset, developed for point of care, near–patient and in vivo application.  Nano-devices and nano-biosensors will permit the detection and measurement of biomarkers present in fluid or tissue samples at a level of sensitivity far beyond current detection methods; in the parts per billion range.

Having recently been awarded European Convergence Funding from the Welsh Assembly Government’s Wales European Funding Office (WEFO), plans for the Centre for NanoHealth (CNH) continue to progress very quickly.  The vision is that it will be located within a clinical and biomedical research environment with direct links to both Swansea University and Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board’s Singleton Hospital site, giving access to patients and creating a pioneering, integrated facility in which novel devices and sensors can be designed, manufactured, functionalised, tested and evaluated. 

www.nanohealth.swansea.ac.uk