Centre for NanoHealth welcomes new Co-Director

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Swansea University’s Centre for NanoHealth (CNH) has welcomed a new addition to its Board of Directors.

Prof Huw SummersProfessor Huw Summers, current Chair of Nanotechnology for Health and Head of the Multidisciplinary Nanotechnology Centre at Swansea University, joins the Centre for NanoHealth's existing Directors, Professor Steve Wilks and Professor Steve Conlan, to take CNH into its next phase of development.

The Centre, which was established five years ago, combines nanotechnology with medical science to provide opportunities to develop innovative solutions to the world’s challenge of detecting the onset of diseases at the earliest stage.

New medical devices, processes and sensors can be designed, manufactured, functionalised, tested and evaluated for point of care, near–patient and in vivo applications.

The Centre was built specifically to support companies throughout Wales, as well as internationally, and offers a range of services from consultancy, research and development, testing, prototyping to small batch manufacturing.

Professor Summers, who is also a Senior Affiliate Member of the Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston, Texas, said: “I am delighted to be appointed as Co-Director at the Centre for NanoHealth. The centre’s multidisciplinary approach is very exciting and enables us to offer companies a one-stop-shop in meeting their business needs.

“The extensive state-of-the-art equipment and facilities, combined with the breath of internationally renowned research expertise available is hard to match elsewhere.”

Professor Summers, who is based within the University’s College of Engineering, brings with him an extensive portfolio of experience in business and research excellence.

Over the last 20 years, he has been continuously involved with industry. Working in semiconductor optoelectronics, he has been involved in collaborations with Agilent, Sharp Electronics, Motorola and IQE.

More recently Professor Summers has managed medically-related projects in close cooperation with GE Healthcare and Merck Millipore.

For the last four years, he has been Director of the Swansea Knowledge Transfer Centre in Semiconductors and Photonics, a £400K Welsh Government A4B project, which assisted more than 30 local companies and led to more than £500 million of R&D grant capture plus £400K of commercial investment.

In addition, Professor Summers is internationally recognised for his research excellence, which focuses on two areas: metrologies for cell analysis (cytometry) and the development of nanoparticle-based diagnostics and therapeutics (nanomedicine). 

This work seeks to use physics and engineering approaches to cell population analysis, e.g. systems analysis of cell cycle progression or statistical mechanics on nanoparticle-cell interactions.

Computational and statistical analyses are applied to large cell populations (> 100,000) with the enabling technology being high throughput, high content cytometry (microscope and flow system based) and the core aim to understand and quantify cell heterogeneity.

The use of nanotechnology is common throughout his research, which uses the customisability of micro and nano-engineered structures to provide novel optical analysis and manipulation of living cells.

In the field of nanomedicine, Professor Summers’ research team is one of only a handful developing quantitative statistical assays for the assessment of nanoparticle dose in proliferating cell populations and this has led to collaborations with a number of world leading groups.

“This is a very exciting time for the Centre for NanoHealth and we welcome Huw’s addition to the team in taking the Centre forward,” said Professor Steve Wilks, Co-Director of the CNH and Head of the University’s College of Science.


The Centre for NanoHealth (CNH) at Swansea University offers access to more than 50 academic staff from the Colleges of Medicine, Engineering and Science, Health Board (NHS) clinicians, and industry. This 1600m2 purpose build open access facility provides a technology and innovation base for SMEs in Wales and beyond. To date CNH has initiated many collaborative projects with industry and other HEIs realising more than £15 Million further investment.

The Centre is a member of several global nanohealth networks including leading The Celtic Alliance for NanoHealth, the Alliance for NanoHealth, ETP nanomedicine and is a founding member of the Health Science and Technologies Collaborative Innovation Centre with Soochow University and Biobay in Suzhou, China.

Believed to be Europe’s first Centre for NanoHealth, the circa £22 million project was funded through £10 million from the European Regional Development Fund through the Welsh Government, Swansea University, Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, Welsh Government Department for Health and Social Services and the Private Sector. Visit www.swansea.ac.uk/nanohealth