They are tiny magic bullets that are quietly shaping the lives of millions of patients around the world. Produced in the lab, invisible to the naked eye, relatively few people are aware of these molecules’ existence or where they came from. Yet monoclonal antibodies are contained in six out of ten of the world’s bestselling drugs, helping to treat everything from cancer to heart disease to asthma.

Known as Mabs for short, these molecules are derived from the millions of antibodies the immune system continually makes to fight foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses. The technique for producing them was first published 40 years ago. It was developed byCésar Milstein, an Argentinian émigré, and Georges Köhler, a German post-doctoral researcher. They were based at the UK Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.

Harnessing the power of the immune system

Milstein and Köhler wanted to investigate how the immune system can produce so many different types of antibodies, each capable of specifically targeting one of a near-infinite number of foreign substances that invade the body. This had puzzled scientists ever since the late 19th century, but an answer had proved elusive. Isolating and purifying single antibodies with known targets, out of the billions made by the body, was a challenge.

The two scientists finally solved this problem by immunising a mouse against a particular foreign substance and then fusing antibodies taken from its spleen with a cell associated with myeloma, a cancer that develops in the bone marrow. Their method created a hybrid cell that secreted Mabs. Such cells could be grown indefinitely, in the abdominal cavity of mice or in tissue culture, producing endless quantities of identical antibodies specific to a chosen target. Mabs can be tailored to combat a wide range of conditions.

When Milstein and Köhler first publicised their technique, relatively few people understood its significance. Editors of Nature missed its importance, asking the two scientists to cut short their article outlining the new technique; as did staff at the British National Research Development Corporation, who declined to patent the work after Milstein submitted it for consideration. Within a short period, however, the technique was being adopted by scientists around the world, and less than ten years later Milstein and Köhler were Nobel laureates.

A transformation in therapeutic medicine

In the years that have passed since 1975, Mab drugs have radically reshaped medicine and spawned a whole new industry. It is predicted that 70 Mab products will have reached the worldwide market by 2020, with combined sales of nearly $125bn (£81bn).

Key to the success of Mab drugs are the dramatic changes they have brought to thetreatment of cancer, helping in many cases to shift it away from being a terminal disease. Mabs can very specifically target cancer cells while avoiding healthy cells, and can also be used to harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. Overall, Mab drugs cause fewer debilitating side-effects than more conventional chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Mabs have also radically altered the treatment of inflammatory and autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, moving away from merely relieving symptoms to targeting and disrupting their cause.

Aside from cancer and autoimmune disorders, Mabs are being used to treat over 50 other major diseases. Applications include treatment for heart disease, allergic conditions such as asthma, and prevention of organ rejection after transplants. Mabs are also under investigation for the treatment of central nervous disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, metabolic diseases like diabetes, and the prevention of migraines. More recently they were explored as a means to combat Ebola, the virus disease that ravaged West Africa in 2014.

Fast and accurate diagnosis

Mabs have enabled faster and more accurate clinical diagnostic testing, opening up the means to detect numerous diseases that were previously impossible to identify until their advanced stages. They have paved the way in personalised medicine, where patients are matched with the most suitable drug. Mabs are intrinsic components in over-the-counter pregnancy tests, are key to spotting a heart attack, and help to screen blood for infectious diseases like hepatitis B and AIDS. They are also used on a routine basis in hospitals to type blood and tissue, a process vital to ensuring safe blood transfusion and organ transplants.

Mabs are also invaluable to many other aspects of everyday life. For example they are vital to agriculture, helping to identify viruses in animal livestock or plants, and to the food industry in the prevention of the spread of salmonella. In addition they are instrumental in the efforts to curb environmental pollution.

Quietly triumphant

Yet Mabs remain hidden from public view. This is partly because the history of the technology has often been overshadowed by the groundbreaking and controversialAmerican development of genetic engineering in 1973, which revolutionised the manufacturing and production of natural products such as insulin, and inspired the foundation of Genentech, one of the world’s first biotechnology companies.

Looking back, the oversight is not surprising. Mabs did not transform medicine overnight or with any major fanfare, and the scientists who made the discovery did not seek fame. Instead, Mabs quietly slipped unobserved into everyday healthcare practice.

An Argentinian and a German came together in a British Laboratory and changed the face of medicine forever; their story deserves to be told.

Lara Marks is at University of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can independently build its own children and test which one does best; and then use the results to inform the design of the next generation, so that preferential traits are passed down from one generation to the next.

Without any human intervention or computer simulation beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement, the mother created children constructed of between one and five plastic cubes with a small motor inside.

In each of five separate experiments, the mother designed, built and tested generations of ten children, using the information gathered from one generation to inform the design of the next. The results, reported in the open access journal PLOS One, found that preferential traits were passed down through generations, so that the ‘fittest’ individuals in the last generation performed a set task twice as quickly as the fittest individuals in the first generation.

“Natural selection is basically reproduction, assessment, reproduction, assessment and so on,” said lead researcher Dr Fumiya Iida of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who worked in collaboration with researchers at ETH Zurich. “That’s essentially what this robot is doing – we can actually watch the improvement and diversification of the species.”

For each robot child, there is a unique ‘genome’ made up of a combination of between one and five different genes, which contains all of the information about the child’s shape, construction and motor commands. As in nature, evolution in robots takes place through ‘mutation’, where components of one gene are modified or single genes are added or deleted, and ‘crossover’, where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals.

In order for the mother to determine which children were the fittest, each child was tested on how far it travelled from its starting position in a given amount of time. The most successful individuals in each generation remained unchanged in the next generation in order to preserve their abilities, while mutation and crossover were introduced in the less successful children.

The researchers found that design variations emerged and performance improved over time: the fastest individuals in the last generation moved at an average speed that was more than twice the average speed of the fastest individuals in the first generation. This increase in performance was not only due to the fine-tuning of design parameters, but also because the mother was able to invent new shapes and gait patterns for the children over time, including some designs that a human designer would not have been able to build.

“One of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about – we’re using robotics to explore this mystery,” said Iida. “We think of robots as performing repetitive tasks, and they’re typically designed for mass production instead of mass customisation, but we want to see robots that are capable of innovation and creativity.”

In nature, organisms are able to adapt their physical characteristics to their environment over time. These adaptations allow biological organisms to survive in a wide variety of different environments – allowing animals to make the move from living in the water to living on land, for instance.

But machines are not adaptable in the same way. They are essentially stuck in one shape for their entire ‘lives’, and it’s uncertain whether changing their shape would make them more adaptable to changing environments.

Evolutionary robotics is a growing field which allows for the creation of autonomous robots without human intervention. Most work in this field is done using computer simulation. Although computer simulations allow researchers to test thousands or even millions of possible solutions, this often results in a ‘reality gap’ – a mismatch between simulated and real-world behaviour.

While using a computer simulation to study artificial evolution generates thousands, or even millions, of possibilities in a short amount of time, the researchers found that having the robot generate its own possibilities, without any computer simulation, resulted in more successful children. The disadvantage is that it takes time: each child took the robot about 10 minutes to design, build and test. According to Iida, in future they might use a computer simulation to pre-select the most promising candidates, and use real-world models for actual testing.

Iida’s research looks at how robotics can be improved by taking inspiration from nature, whether that’s learning about intelligence, or finding ways to improve robotic locomotion. A robot requires between ten and 100 times more energy than an animal to do the same thing. Iida’s lab is filled with a wide array of hopping robots, which may take their inspiration from grasshoppers, humans or even dinosaurs. One of his group’s developments, the ‘Chairless Chair’, is a wearable device that allows users to lock their knee joints and ‘sit’ anywhere, without the need for a chair.

“It’s still a long way to go before we’ll have robots that look, act and think like us,” said Iida. “But what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world.”

Reference:
Brodbeck, L. et al. “Morphological Evolution of Physical Robots through Model-Free Phenotype Development” PLOS One (2015). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0128444

The study, published today in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, also found that older people tended to be more easily distracted than younger adults.

Age is believed to change the way our brains respond and how its networks interact, but studies looking at these changes tend to use very artificial experiments, with basic stimuli. To try to understand how we respond to complex, life-like stimuli, researchers at the Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience (Cam-CAN) showed 218 subjects aged 18-88 an edited version of an episode from the Hitchcock TV series while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure their brain activity.

The researchers found a surprising degree of similarity in the thought patterns amongst the younger subjects – their brains tended to ‘light up’ in similar ways and at similar points in the programme. However, in older subjects, this similarity tended to disappear and their thought processes became more idiosyncratic, suggesting that they were responding differently to what they were watching and were possibly more distracted.

The greatest differences were seen in the ‘higher order’ regions at the front of the brain, which are responsible for controlling attention (the superior frontal lobe and the intraparietal sulcus) and language processing (the bilateral middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus).

The findings suggest that our ability to respond to everyday events in the environment differs with age, possibly due to altered patterns of attention.

Dr Karen Campbell from the Department of Psychology, first author on the study, says: “As we age, our ability to control the focus of attention tends to decline, and we end up attending to more ‘distracting’ information than younger adults. As a result, older adults end up attending to a more diverse range of stimuli and so are more likely to understand and interpret everyday events in different ways than younger people.”

In order to encourage audiences to respond to movies and TV programmes in the same way as everyone else, and hence have a ‘shared experience’, directors and cinematographers use a variety of techniques to draw attention to the focal item in each shot. When the stimulus is less engaging – for example, when one character is talking at length or the action is slow, people show less overlap in their neural patterns of activity, suggesting that a stimulus needs to be sufficiently captivating in order to drive attention. However, capturing attention is not sufficient when watching a film; the brain needs to maintain attention or at the very least, to limit attention to that information which is most relevant to the plot.

Dr Campbell and colleagues argue that the variety in brain patterns seen amongst older people reflects a difference in their ability to control their attention, as attentional capture by stimuli in the environment is known to be relatively preserved with age. This supports previous research which shows that older adults respond to and better remember materials with emotional content.

“We know that regions at the front of the brain are responsible for maintaining our attention, and these are the areas that see the greatest structural changes as we ages, and it is these changes that we believe are being reflected in our study,” she adds. “There may well be benefits to this distractibility. Attending to lots of different information could help with our creativity, for example.”

Cam-CAN is supported by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Reference
Campbell, K et al. Idiosyncratic responding during movie-watching predicted by age differences in attentional control. Neurobiology of Aging; 6 Aug 2015.

Stripes might not offer protection for animals living in groups, such as zebra, as previously thought, according to research published today in the journal Frontiers in Zoology.

Humans playing a computer game captured striped targets more easily than uniform grey targets when multiple targets were present. The finding runs counter to assumptions that stripes evolved to make it difficult to capture animals moving in a group.

“We found that when targets are presented individually, horizontally striped targets are more easily captured than targets with vertical or diagonal stripes. Surprisingly, we also found no benefit of stripes when multiple targets were presented at once, despite the prediction that stripes should be particularly effective in a group scenario,” said Anna Hughes, a researcher in the Sensory Evolution and Ecology group and the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience.

“This could be due to how different stripe orientations interact with motion perception, where an incorrect reading of a target’s speed helps the predator to catch its prey.”

Stripes, zigzags and high contrast markings make animals highly conspicuous, which you might think would make them more visible to a predator. Researchers have wondered if movement is important in explaining why these patterns have evolved. Striking patterns may confuse predators and reduce the chance of attack or capture. In a concept termed ‘motion dazzle’, where high contrast patterns cause predators to misperceive the speed and direction of the moving animal. It was suggested that motion dazzle might be strongest in groups, such as a herd of zebra.

‘Motion dazzle’ is a reference to a type of camouflage used on ships in World Wars One and Two, where ships were patterned in geometric shapes in contrasting colors. Rather than concealing ships, this dazzle camouflage was believed to make it difficult to estimate a target’s range, speed and heading.

HMS Argus (1917) wearing dazzle camouflage.

A total of 60 human participants played a game to test whether stripes influenced their perception of moving targets. They performed a touch screen task in which they attempted to ‘catch’ moving targets – both when only one target was present on screen and when there were several targets present at once.

When single targets were present, horizontal striped targets were easier to capture than any other target, including uniform color, or vertical or diagonal stripes. However, when multiple targets were present, all striped targets, irrespective of the orientation, were captured more easily than uniform grey targets.

“Motion may just be one aspect in a larger picture. Different orientations of stripe patterning may have evolved for different purposes. The evolution of pattern types is complex, for which there isn’t one over-ruling factor, but a multitude of possibilities,” said Hughes.

“More work is needed to establish the value and ecological relevance of ‘motion dazzle’. Now we need to consider whether color, stripe width and spatial patterning, and a predator’s visual system could be important factors for animals to avoid capture.”

Anna Hughes has written a blog post on this research for the journal publisher BioMed Central. Above story adapted from a BioMed Central press release. 

Researchers Alex Thornton, now at the University of Exeter, and Gabrielle Davidson carried out the study with the wild jackdaw population in Madingley village on the outskirts of Cambridge. They found that the jackdaws were able to distinguish between two masks worn by the same researcher, and only responded defensively to the one they had previously seen accessing their nest box.

Over three consecutive days Davidson approached the nest boxes wearing one of the masks and took chicks out to weigh them. She also simply walked past the nest boxes wearing the other mask. Following this she spent four days sitting near the nest boxes wearing each of the masks to see how the jackdaws would respond.

The researchers found that the jackdaws were quicker to return to their nest when they saw the mask that they had previously seen approaching and removing chicks to be weighed, than when they saw the mask that had simply walked by.

They also tended to be quicker to go inside the nest box when Davidson, wearing the mask, was looking directly at them rather than looking down at the ground.

“The fact that they learn to recognise individual facial features or hair patterns so quickly, and to a lesser extent which direction people are looking in, provides great evidence of the flexible cognitive abilities of these birds,” says Davidson. “It also suggests that being able to recognise individual predators and the levels of threat they pose may be more important for guarding chicks than responding to the direction of the predator’s gaze.”

“Using the masks was important to make sure that the birds were not responding to my face, which they may have already seen approaching their nest boxes and weighing chicks in the past,” she adds.

Previous studies have found that crows, magpies and mockingbirds are similarly able to recognise individual people. However, most studies have involved birds in busier urban areas where they are likely to come into more frequent contact with humans.

Jackdaws are the only corvids in the UK that use nest boxes so they provide a rare opportunity for researchers to study how birds respond to humans in the wild. Researchers at Cambridge have been studying the Madingley jackdaws since 2010.

“It would be fascinating to directly compare how these birds respond to humans in urban and rural areas to see whether the amount of human contact they experience has an impact on how they respond to people,” says Davidson.

“It would also be interesting to investigate whether jackdaws are similarly able to recognise individuals of other predator species – although this would be a lot harder to test.”

The study was enabled by funding from Zoology Balfour Fund, Cambridge Philosophical Society, British Ecological Survey, and BBSRC David Philips Research Fellowship.

Inset images: Mask (Elsa Loissel).

Reference:

Davidson, GL et al.,Wild jackdaws, Corvus monedula, recognize individual humans and may respond to gaze direction with defensive behaviour Animal Behaviour 108 October 2015 17-24.

The Alan Turing Institute has marked its first few days of operations with the announcement of its new director, the confirmation of £10 million of research funding from Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a research partnership with GCHQ, a collaboration with Cray Inc and EPSRC, and its first research activities.

The Institute will promote the development and use of advanced mathematics, computer science, algorithms and big data for human benefit. The University of Cambridge is one of the Institute’s founding partners, along with the universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, UCL, Warwick and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). As of 22 July, the Institute, which will be based at the British Library in London, is now fully constituted and has begun operations.

Jo Johnson, Minister for Universities and Science, said: “The Alan Turing Institute has set off on a speedy course to secure new lasting partnerships and bring together expertise from across the UK that will help secure our place as a world leader in areas like Big Data, computer science and advanced mathematics.”

The Institute has also announced that:

• Has appointed Professor Andrew Blake, who will join the Institute in October, as its first Director;
• Has accepted a formally approved offer of £10 million of research funding from the board of the Lloyd’s Register Foundation;
• Will work with GCHQ on open access and commercial data-analysis methods;
• Is to collaborate with Cray Inc. and EPSRC to exploit a next generation analytics capability on the UK’s Largest Supercomputer for scientific research, ARCHER;
• Is issuing its first call for expressions of interest from research fellows;
• Will commence research work this autumn with a series of data summits for commerce, industry and the physical and social sciences and scoping workshops for data and social scientists to inform and shape the Institute’s research agenda.

Andrew Blake is currently a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist and Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research UK. He is an Honorary Professor in Information Engineering at Cambridge, a Fellow of Clare Hall and a leading researcher in computer vision. He studied Mathematics and Electrical Sciences at Trinity College, and after a year as a Kennedy Scholar at MIT and time in the electronics industry, he completed a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh in 1983.

“I am very excited to be chosen for this unique opportunity to lead The Alan Turing Institute,” said Blake. “The vision of bringing together the mathematical and computer scientists from the country’s top universities to develop the new discipline of data science, through an independent institute with strategic links to commerce and industry, is very compelling. The institute has a societally important mission and ambitious research goals. We will go all out to achieve them.”

“The enthusiasm and commitment of the founding partners have enabled the Institute to make rapid progress,” said Howard Covington, chair of The Alan Turing Institute. “We will now turn to building the Institute’s research activities. We are delighted to welcome Andrew Blake as our new director and to begin strategic relationships with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation and GCHQ. Our cooperation with Cray Inc. is one of several relationships with major infrastructure and service providers that will be agreed over the coming months. We are also in discussions with a number of industrial and commercial firms who we expect to become strategic partners in due course and are highly encouraged by the breadth of interest in working with the Institute.”

Professor Philip Nelson, Chief Executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) added: “I am delighted to see The Alan Turing Institute up and running. The teams from EPSRC and the founding universities have shown outstanding collaboration in bringing together five of our world-class academic institutions. We look forward to the Institute becoming an internationally leading player in data science.”

“Getting the most out of big data requires new methods to handle large quantities of information and the clever use of algorithms to distil meaningful knowledge out of such volumes,” said Professor John Aston of Cambridge’s Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics, who is the university’s representative on the Alan Turing Institute Board of Directors. “Research in this area could revolutionise our ability to compare, cross-reference and analyse data in ways that have previously been beyond the bounds of human or computer analysis.

The Alan Turing Institute is a joint venture between the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick, UCL and EPSRC – The Alan Turing Institute will attract the best data scientists and mathematicians from the UK and across the globe to break new boundaries in how we use big data in a fast moving, competitive world.

The Institute is being funded over five years with £42 million from the UK government. The university partners are contributing £5 million each, totalling £25 million. In addition, the Institute will seek to partner with other business and government bodies. The creation of the Institute has been coordinated by the EPSRC which invests in research and postgraduate training across the UK.

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behaviour through to hallucinations and delusions. Psychotic symptoms are reasonably well treated by current medications; however, patients are still left with debilitating cognitive impairments, including in their memory, and so are frequently unable to return to university or work.

There are as yet no licensed pharmaceutical treatments to improve cognitive functions for people with schizophrenia. However, there is increasing evidence that computer-assisted training and rehabilitation can help people with schizophrenia overcome some of their symptoms, with better outcomes in daily functioning and their lives.

Schizophrenia is estimated to cost £13.1 billion per year in total in the UK, so even small improvements in cognitive functions could help patients make the transition to independent living and working and could therefore substantially reduce direct and indirect costs, besides improving the wellbeing and health of patients.

In a study published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers led by Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge describe how they developed and tested Wizard, an iPad game aimed at improving an individual’s episodic memory. Episodic memory is the type of memory required when you have to remember where you parked your car in a multi-storey car park after going shopping for several hours or where you left your keys in home several hours ago, for example. It is one of the facets of cognitive functioning to be affected in patients with schizophrenia.

The game, Wizard, was the result of a nine-month collaboration between psychologists, neuroscientists, a professional game-developer and people with schizophrenia. It was intended to be fun, attention-grabbing, motivating and easy to understand, whilst at the same time improving the player’s episodic memory. The memory task was woven into a narrative in which the player was allowed to choose their own character and name; the game rewarded progress with additional in-game activities to provide the user with a sense of progression independent of the cognitive training process.

The researchers assigned twenty-two participants, who had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, to either the cognitive training group or a control group at random. Participants in the training group played the memory game for a total of eight hours over a four-week period; participants in the control group continued their treatment as usual. At the end of the four weeks, the researchers tested all participants’ episodic memory using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) PAL, as well as their level of enjoyment and motivation, and their score on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale, which doctors use to rate the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.

Professor Sahakian and colleagues found that the patients who had played the memory game made significantly fewer errors and needed significantly fewer attempts to remember the location of different patterns in the CANTAB PAL test relative to the control group. In addition, patients in the cognitive training group saw an increase in their score on the GAF scale.

Participants in the cognitive training group indicated that they enjoyed the game and were motivated to continue playing across the eight hours of cognitive training. In fact, the researchers found that those who were most motivated also performed best at the game. This is important, as lack of motivation is another common facet of schizophrenia.

Professor Sahakian says: “We need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory, but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment. So this proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed. Because the game is interesting, even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training.”

Professor Peter Jones adds: “These are promising results and suggest that there may be the potential to use game apps to not only improve a patient’s episodic memory, but also their functioning in activities of daily living. We will need to carry out further studies with larger sample sizes to confirm the current findings, but we hope that, used in conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, this could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life.”

It is not clear exactly how the apps also improved the patients’ daily functioning, but the researchers suggest it may be because improvements in memory had a direct impact on global functions or that the cognitive training may have had an indirect impact on functionality by improving general motivation and restoring self-esteem. Or indeed, both these explanations may have played a role in terms of the impact of training on functional outcome.

In April 2015, Professor Sahakian and colleagues began a collaboration with the team behind the popular brain training app Peak to produce scientifically-tested cognitive training modules. The collaboration has resulted in the launch today of the Cambridge University & Peak Advanced Training Plan a memory game, available within Peak’s iOS app, designed to train visual and episodic memory while promoting learning.

The training module is based on the Wizard memory game, developed by Professor Sahakian and colleague Tom Piercy at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. Rights to the Wizard game were licensed to Peak by Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s commercialisation company.

“This new app will allow the Wizard memory game to become widely available, inexpensively. State-of-the-art neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, combined with the innovative approach at Peak, will help bring the games industry to a new level and promote the benefits of cognitive enhancement,” says Professor Sahakian.

Reference
Sahakian, BJ et al. The impact of neuroscience on society: Cognitive enhancement in neuropsychiatric disorders and in healthy people. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B; 3 Aug 2015

Home page image: Brain Power by Allan Ajifo

William Smith’s 1815 Geological Map of England and Wales, which measures 8.5ft x 6ft, demonstrated for the first time the geology of the UK and was the culmination of years of work by Smith, who was shunned by the scientific community for many years and ended up in debtors’ prison.

Today, exactly 200 years since its first publication, a copy of Smith’s map – rediscovered after more than a century in a museum box – will go on public display at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Aside from a copy held at The Geological Society in London, the Cambridge map is believed to be the only such map on public display anywhere in the world.

The iconic map, which is still used as the basis of geological maps to this day, had the greatest influence on the science of geology, inspiring a generation of naturalists and fledgling geologists to establish geology as a coherent, robust and important science. The map was so large, that, for practicality’s sake, it was often sold in 15 separate sheets, either loose, or in a leather travelling case.

Museum Director Ken McNamara said: “This is the world’s earliest geological map. Smith was working from a position of no knowledge when he began. Nobody had ever attempted this before and it’s really quite staggering what this one man achieved over ten or fifteen years, travelling up and down the country as a canal surveyor.

“It’s incredibly accurate, even now in 2015. If you compare the current geological map of Great Britain today there are amazing similarities. The British Geological Survey still uses the same colour scheme that Smith devised. Chalk is green. Limestone is yellow and it’s still done like that to this day.”

“This started geology as a modern science. It’s like the Magna Carta of geology, the beginnings of geology as a modern science and that’s why it’s so important.”

Smith’s map proudly announced itself to the world as: “A DELINEATION of the STRATA of ENGLAND and WALES with part of SCOTLAND; exhibiting the COLLIERIES and MINES; the MARSHES and FEN LANDS ORIGINALLY OVERFLOWED BY THE SEA; and the VARIETIES of Soil according to the Variations in the Substrata; ILLUSTRATED by the MOST DESCRIPTIVE NAMES”.

How many of Smith’s great maps still exist is unclear. Around 70 are thought to remain worldwide. The Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, the oldest geological museum in the world, is lucky enough to have three copies.

For many years the museum knew that it possessed two of Smith’s great maps: one a set of 15 sheets bound together as a book; the other, beautifully preserved, nestles in its leather travelling case. Two years ago, in May 2013, a third copy was rediscovered in the collection. Found folded in a box with some other early geological maps, staff believe it had not seen the light of day since Queen Victoria was on the throne.

Close up detail from the Smith map1 of 7

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Despite its decades hidden from view, the hand-coloured map had been exposed to harsh light for many years before being packed away. The colours were faded, the paper stained and it carried the stains of faecal deposits from long dead spiders and flies.

The map was then conserved by experts at Duxford, near Cambridge. Nineteenth century dirt and grime was carefully removed, then the original, faded water-colour paint was given a protective coating and subtly restored to enhance the colour of the rock formations. Only 400 were ever produced over at least a four-year period. During that time, Smith continued his geological research and continually made new discoveries, adapting and amending each new edition as he went along. Each individual map took seven or eight days to be coloured.

McNamara said: “Smith suffered many deprivations in his life. He became a bankrupt and ended up in debtor’s prison for a while. Perhaps, almost as galling, he was largely ignored by the geological establishment. However, he gained his due recognition from the Geological Society of London later in life when, in 1831, he was the first person to receive the society’s most prestigious medal, the Wollaston Medal.

“Appropriately, given the hanging of his map in the Sedgwick Museum, it was Adam Sedgwick who presented Smith with his medal. We are, we think, the only museum, library or art gallery in the world to have one of Smith’s legendary maps on public display – and we want as many people as possible to come and see this enormous, iconic and beautiful map for themselves.”

The results are based on further analysis of survey data from more than 70,000 cancer patients, by Cancer Research UK scientists at the University of Cambridge and University College London, published today in theEuropean Journal of Cancer Care.

Of the nearly 60,000 survey respondents diagnosed through their GP, almost a quarter (23 per cent) had been seen three or more times before being referred for cancer tests.

Four in ten (39 per cent) of those who had experienced referral delays were dissatisfied with the support they received from their GP compared to just under three in ten (28 per cent) of those referred after one or two GP visits.

Overall, patients who had seen their GP three or more times before being referred were more likely to report negative experiences across 10 of 12 different aspects of their care. For example, 18 per cent of these patients were dissatisfied with the way they were told they had cancer, compared to 14 per cent among those who were referred more quickly.

Four in ten expressed dissatisfaction with how hospital staff and their GP had worked with each other to provide the best possible care, compared to one in three among those referred promptly.

Dissatisfaction with the overall care received was even higher among the just under one in ten (9 per cent) patients who saw their GP five or more times before being referred.

Study author Dr Georgios Lyratzopoulos, from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care at the University of Cambridge, said: “This research shows that first impressions go a long way in determining how cancer patients view their experience of cancer treatment. A negative experience of diagnosis can trigger loss of confidence in their care throughout the cancer journey.

“When they occur, diagnostic delays are largely due to cancer symptoms being extremely hard to distinguish from other diseases, combined with a lack of accurate and easy-to-use tests. New diagnostic tools to help doctors decide which patients need referring are vital to improve the care experience for even more cancer patients.”

Dr Richard Roope, Cancer Research UK’s GP expert, said: “It’s vital we now step up efforts to ensure potential cancer symptoms can be investigated promptly, such as through the new NICE referral guidelines launched last month to give GPs more freedom to quickly refer patients with worrying symptoms. This will hopefully contribute to improving the patient experience, one of the six strategic priorities recommended by the UK’s Cancer Task Force last week.”

Reference

Mendonca S.C. et al, Pre-referral general practitioner consultations and subsequent experience of cancer care: evidence from the English Cancer Patient Experience Survey,European Journal of Cancer (2015)

Adapted from a press release by Cancer Research UK.

The Therapeutics Consortium, announced today, will connect the intellectual know-how of several large academic institutions with the drug-developing potential of the pharmaceutical industry, to deliver better drugs to the clinic.

From early 2018, the Consortium will form a major constituent of the new Milner Therapeutics Institute, which has been made possible through a £5 million donation from Jonathan Milner and will be located in a new building at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, the centrepiece of the largest biotech cluster outside the United States.

The Consortium will connect academic and clinical researchers at the University of Cambridge, the Babraham Institute and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute with pharmaceutical companies Astex Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It will provide researchers with the potential to access novel therapeutic agents (including small molecules and antibodies) across the entire portfolio of drugs being developed by each of the companies, in order to investigate their mechanism, efficacy and potential. The terms of the Consortium allow for fast and easy access to these agents and information.

Each industry partner within the Therapeutics Consortium has committed funding to spend on collaborative projects and will collectively fund an executive manager to oversee the academic/industry interactions. Collaborative projects are expected to lead to joint publications, supporting a culture of more open innovation.

Professor Tony Kouzarides from the University of Cambridge, who will head the Therapeutics Consortium and the Milner Institute, is currently deputy director at the Gurdon Institute. He says: “The Milner Institute will act as a ‘match-making’ service through the Therapeutics Consortium, connecting the world-leading research potential of the University of Cambridge and partner institutions with the drug development expertise and resources of the pharmaceutical industry. We hope many more pharmaceutical companies will join our consortium and believe this form of partnership is a model for how academic institutions and industry can work together to deliver better medicines.”

Dr Harren Jhoti, President and CEO of Cambridge-based company Astex Pharmaceuticals, now part of Japan’s Otsuka Group, said: “As a company that was founded right here in Cambridge we are delighted to support this new Consortium working together with leading Cambridge academic and clinical researchers to help us to research and develop ever better treatments for patients.”

Mene Pangalos, Executive Vice President, Innovative Medicines & Early Development at AstraZeneca said: “We are pleased to be part of this exciting new consortium that brings together world-leading science and technology into a dedicated multi-disciplinary institute focused on translational research.  The proximity of the Institute to our new R&D centre and global headquarters in Cambridge will ensure our scientists can work closely with those at the Milner Institute.”

Professor Michael Wakelam, Director of the Babraham Institute, said: “The Institute’s participation in the Therapeutics Consortium provides yet one more channel by which our excellence in basic biological research is built upon in partnership with industry-based collaborators. We know from experience that bringing together the best academics and the best pharmacological research is both efficient and enlightening and we look forward to making joint progress.”

Dr Rab Prinjha, Head of GSK’s Epigenetics Discovery Performance Unit, said: “Late-stage attrition is too high – very few investigational medicines entering human trials eventually become an approved treatment.  As an industry, we must improve our success rate by understanding our molecules and targets better.  This innovative institute which builds on GSK’s very successful collaboration with the Gurdon Institute and close links with many groups across Cambridge, aims to increase our knowledge of basic biological mechanisms to help us bring the right investigational medicines into human trials and ultimately to patients.”

The Consortium will initially operate from the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, but will move into the Milner Institute in early 2018.

The Milner Therapeutics Institute

One of the major aims of the Institute will be to help understand how drugs work and to push forward new ideas and technologies to improve the development of novel therapies. A major, but not exclusive, focus of the Institute will be cancer.

It is envisaged that the Milner Institute will be equipped with core facilities, such as high-throughput screening of small molecules against cell lines, organoids (‘mini organs’) and tumour biopsies, as well as bioinformatics support to help scientists deal with large datasets. Its facilities will be available to researchers working on collaborative projects within the Therapeutics Consortium and, capacity permitting, to other scientists and clinicians within the Cambridge community.

In addition, the Milner Institute will have space for senior and junior scientists to set up independent research groups. There will also be associated faculty positions, which will be taken up by scientists in different departments, whose research and expertise will benefit from a close association with the Milner Institute.

The Milner Institute will be housed within the new Capella building, alongside the relocated Wellcome Trust/MRC Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, a new Centre for Blood & Leukaemia Research, and a new Centre for Immunology & Immunotherapeutics.

Jonathan Milner, whose donation has made the Milner Therapeutics Institute possible, is a former member of Tony Kouzarides’ research group and experienced entrepreneur. In 1998 they founded leading biotechnology company Abcam together with Professor David Cleevely, which has gone on to employ over 800 people and supply products to 64% of researchers globally.

The treasures of Cambridge University Library’s Chinese collections are the latest addition to the Digital Library website (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/chinese) which already hosts the works of Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Siegfried Sassoon, as well as unique collections on the Board of Longitude and the Royal Commonwealth Society.

The oracle bones (ox shoulder blades and turtle shells) are one of the Library’s most important collections and are the earliest surviving examples of Chinese writing anywhere in the world. They are the oldest form of documents owned by the Library and record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang, which ruled central China between the 16th and 11th centuries BCE. (http://bit.ly/1RJkZEG).

As the earliest known specimens of the Chinese script, the oracle bone inscriptions are of fundamental importance for Chinese palaeography and our understanding of ancient Chinese society. The bones record information on a wide range of matters including warfare, agriculture, hunting and medical problems, as well as genealogical, meteorological and astronomical data, such as the earliest records of eclipses and comets.

Never before displayed, three of the 800 oracle bones held in the Library can now be viewed in exquisite detail, alongside a 17th-century book which has been described as ‘perhaps the most beautiful set of prints ever made’ (http://bit.ly/1fMfAf3). Estimated to be worth millions on the open market, the ‘Manual of Calligraphy and Painting’ was made in 1633 by the Ten Bamboo Studio in Nanjing.

Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge University Library, said: “This is the earliest and finest example of multi-colour printing anywhere in the world, comprising 138 paintings and sketches with associated texts by fifty different artists and calligraphers. Although reprinted many times, complete sets of early editions in the original binding are extremely rare.

“The binding is so fragile, and the manual so delicate, that until it was digitized, we have never been able to let anyone look through it or study it – despite its undoubted importance to scholars.”

Other highlights of the digitisation include one of the world’s earliest printed bookshttp://bit.ly/1HRsK0k), a Buddhist text dated between 1127 and 1175. The translator (Xuanzang) was famed for the 17 year pilgrimage to India he undertook to collect religious texts and bring them back to China.

‘The Manual of Famine Relief’ has also been digitised. This 19th-century manuscript contains instructions for the distribution of emergency rations to famine victims and includes practical advice about foraging for natural substitutes to normal foodstuffs in the event of an emergency.

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Elsewhere, a 14th-century banknote (http://bit.ly/1O8QJwB) is one of the more unusual additions to the Chinese Collections. Paper currency first appeared in China during the 7th century, and was in wide circulation by the 11th century, 500 years before its first use in Europe.

By the 12th century the central government had realised the benefits of banknotes for purposes of tax collection and financial administration, and by the late 13th century had printed and issued a national paper currency – accounts of it reached Europe through the writings of Marco Polo and others.

The Library’s banknote, printed on mulberry paper from a cast metal plate, was first issued in 1380. The denomination of the banknote (one thousand cash) is shown by a picture of ten strings of copper cash (10 x 100 = 1000), flanked by a text in seal script which reads: ‘Great Ming Paper Currency; Circulating Throughout the World’. The text underneath threatens forgers with decapitation and promises that anyone denouncing or apprehending them will receive not only a reward of 25 ounces of silver but also all the miscreant’s property.

Huw Jones, part of the digitisation team at Cambridge University Library, said: “The very high quality of the digital images has already led to important discoveries about the material – we have seen where red pigment was used to colour inscriptions on the oracle bones, and seals formerly invisible have been deciphered on several items. We look forward to new insights now that the collection has a truly global audience, and we are already working with an ornithological expert to identify the birds in the Manual of Calligraphy and Painting.”

Cambridge University Library acquired its first Chinese book in 1632 as part of the collection of the Duke of Buckingham, but the first substantial holdings of Chinese books came with the donation of 4,304 volumes by Sir Thomas Wade (1818–1895), first Professor of Chinese in the University from 1888 until his death.

The Chinese collections at Cambridge University Library now number about half a million individual titles, including monographs, reprinted materials, archival documents, epigraphical rubbings and 200,000 Chinese e-books (donated by Premier Wen Jiabao in 2009).

The ‘Cytosponge’ sits within a pill which, when swallowed, dissolves to reveal a sponge that scrapes off cells when withdrawn up the gullet. It allows doctors to collect cells from all along the gullet, whereas standard biopsies take individual point samples.

Oesophageal cancer is often preceded by Barrett’s oesophagus, a condition in which cells within the lining of the oesophagus begin to change shape and can grow abnormally. The cellular changes are cause by acid and bile reflux – when the stomach juices come back up the gullet. Between one and five people in every 100 with Barrett’s oesophagus go on to develop oesophageal cancer in their life-time, a form of cancer that can be difficult to treat, particularly if not caught early enough.

At present, Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer are diagnosed using biopsies, which look for signs of dysplasia, the proliferation of abnormal cancer cells. This is a subjective process, requiring a trained scientist to identify abnormalities. Understanding how oesophageal cancer develops and the genetic mutations involved could help doctors catch the disease earlier, offering better treatment options for the patient.

An alternative way of spotting very early signs of oesophageal cancer would be to look for important genetic changes. However, researchers from the University of Cambridge have shown that variations in mutations across the oesophagus mean that standard biopsies may miss cells with important mutations. A sample was more likely to pick up key mutations if taken using the Cytosponge, developed by Professor Rebecca Fitzgerald at the Medical Research Council Cancer Unit at the University of Cambridge.

“The trouble with Barrett’s oesophagus is that it looks bland and might span over 10cm,” explains Professor Fitzgerald. “We created a map of mutations in a patient with the condition and found that within this stretch, there is a great deal of variation amongst cells. Some might carry an important mutation, but many will not. If you’re taking a biopsy, this relies on your hitting the right spot. Using the Cytosponge appears to remove some of this game of chance.”

Professor Fitzgerald and colleagues carried out whole genome sequencing to analyse paired Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer samples taken at one point in time from 23 patients, as well as 73 samples taken over a three-year period from one patient with Barrett’s oesophagus.

The researchers found patterns of mutations in the genome – where one ‘letter’ of DNA might change to another, for example from a C to a T – that provided a ‘fingerprint’ of the causes of the cancer. Similar work has been done previously in lung cancer, where it was shown that cigarettes leave fingerprints in an individual’s DNA. The Cambridge team found fingerprints which they believe are likely to be due to the damage caused to the lining of the oesophagus by stomach acid splashing onto its walls; the same fingerprints could be seen in both Barrett’s oesophagus and oesophageal cancer, suggest that these changes occur very early on the process.

Even in areas of Barrett’s oesophagus without cancer, the researchers found a large number of mutations in their tissue – on average 12,000 per person (compared to an average of 18,000 mutations within the cancer). Many of these are likely to have been ‘bystanders’, genetic mutations that occurred along the way but that were not actually implicated in cancer.

The researchers found that there appeared to be a tipping point, where a patient would go from having lots of individual mutations, but no cancer, to a situation where large pieces of genetic information were being transferred not just between genes but between chromosomes.

Co-author Dr Caryn Ross-Innes adds: “We know very little about how you go from pre-cancer to cancer – and this is particularly the case in oesophageal cancer. Barrett’s oesophagus and the cancer share many mutations, but we are now a step closer to understanding which are the important mutations that tip the condition over into a potentially deadly form of cancer.”

The research was funded by the Medical Research Council and Cancer Research UK. The Cytosponge was trialled in patients at the NIHR Clinical Investigation Ward at the Cambridge Clinical Research Facility.

Reference
Ross-Innes, CS et al. Whole-genome sequencing provides new insights into the clonal architecture of Barrett’s esophagus and esophageal adenocarcinoma. Nature Genetics; 20 July 2015

The Royal Society, the UK’s independent academy for science, has announced the recipients of its 2015 Awards, Medals and Prize Lectures. The scientists receive the awards in recognition of their achievements in a wide variety of fields of research. The recipients from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor George Efstathiou FRS (Institute of Astronomy) receives the Hughes Medal for many outstanding contributions to our understanding of the early Universe, in particular his pioneering computer simulations, observations of galaxy clustering and studies of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

Professor Benjamin Simons (Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, Cavendish Laboratory) receives the Gabor Medal for his work analysing stem cell lineages in development, tissue homeostasis and cancer, revolutionising our understanding of stem cell behaviour in vivo.

Professor Russell Cowburn FRS (Department of Physics) receives the Clifford Paterson Medal and Lecture for his remarkable academic, technical and commercial achievements in nano-magnetics.

Dr Madan Babu Mohan (MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology) receives the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture for his major and widespread contributions to computational biology.

View the full list of recipients.

They are among 42 highly distinguished UK academics from 18 universities welcomed as Fellows by the Academy, taking the total number of living Fellows to over one thousand for the first time.

The Fellows elected from the University of Cambridge are:

Professor Cyprian Broodbank – John Disney Professor of Archaeology, Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Garth Fowden – Sultan Qaboos Professor of Abrahamic Faiths and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse.

Professor Robert Gordon – Serena Professor of Italian and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Sanjeev Goyal – Professor of Economics and Fellow of Christ’s College.

Professor Peter Mandler – Professor of Modern Cultural History and Bailey Lecturer in History at Gonville & Caius College.

Professor Joachim Whaley – Professor of German History and Thought and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

Also receiving a fellowship is Professor Michael Mann, Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Lord Stern, President of the British Academy, said: “This year we have the honour of once again welcoming the finest researchers and scholars into our Fellowship. Elected from across the UK and world for their distinction in the humanities and social sciences, they represent an unrivalled resource of expertise and knowledge.

“Our Fellows play a vital role in the work of the Academy; encouraging younger researchers, engaging in public discussion of the great issues and ideas of our time, and contributing to policy reports. Their collective work and expertise are testament to why research in the humanities and social sciences is vital for our understanding of the world and humanity.”

The British Academy is the UK’s expert body that supports and speaks for the humanities and social sciences. It funds research across the UK and in other parts of the world, in disciplines ranging from archaeology to economics, from psychology to history, and from literature to law.

View the full list of British Academy Fellows.

A new approach to self-assemble and tailor complex structures at the nanoscale, developed by an international collaboration led by the University of Cambridge and IBM, opens opportunities to tailor properties and functionalities of materials for a wide range of semiconductor device applications.

The researchers have developed a method for growing combinations of different materials in a needle-shaped crystal called a nanowire. Nanowires are small structures, only a few billionths of a metre in diameter. Semiconductors can be grown into nanowires, and the result is a useful building block for electrical, optical, and energy harvesting devices. The researchers have found out how to grow smaller crystals within the nanowire, forming a structure like a crystal rod with an embedded array of gems. Details of the new method are published in the journal Nature Materials.

“The key to building functional nanoscale devices is to control materials and their interfaces at the atomic level,” said Dr Stephan Hofmann of the Department of Engineering, one of the paper’s senior authors. “We’ve developed a method of engineering inclusions of different materials so that we can make complex structures in a very precise way.”

Nanowires are often grown through a process called Vapour-Liquid-Solid (VLS) synthesis, where a tiny catalytic droplet is used to seed and feed the nanowire, so that it self-assembles one atomic layer at a time. VLS allows a high degree of control over the resulting nanowire: composition, diameter, growth direction, branching, kinking and crystal structure can be controlled by tuning the self-assembly conditions. As nanowires become better controlled, new applications become possible.

The technique that Hofmann and his colleagues from Cambridge and IBM developed can be thought of as an expansion of the concept that underlies conventional VLS growth. The researchers use the catalytic droplet not only to grow the nanowire, but also to form new materials within it. These tiny crystals form in the liquid, but later attach to the nanowire and then become embedded as the nanowire is grown further. This catalyst mediated docking process can ‘self-optimise’ to create highly perfect interfaces for the embedded crystals.

To unravel the complexities of this process, the research team used two customised electron microscopes, one at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center and a second at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This allowed them to record high-speed movies of the nanowire growth as it happens atom-by-atom. The researchers found that using the catalyst as a ‘mixing bowl’, with the order and amount of each ingredient programmed into a desired recipe, resulted in complex structures consisting of nanowires with embedded nanoscale crystals, or quantum dots, of controlled size and position.

“The technique allows two different materials to be incorporated into the same nanowire, even if the lattice structures of the two crystals don’t perfectly match,” said Hofmann. “It’s a flexible platform that can be used for different technologies.”

Possible applications for this technique range from atomically perfect buried interconnects to single-electron transistors, high-density memories, light emission, semiconductor lasers, and tunnel diodes, along with the capability to engineer three-dimensional device structures.

“This process has enabled us to understand the behaviour of nanoscale materials in unprecedented detail, and that knowledge can now be applied to other processes,” said Hofmann.

A new report co-authored by Cambridge researchers warns that without technological innovation over the next decade, healthcare costs in the UK could be significantly higher than currently projected by the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). Without productivity improvements, health spending in 2063-64 might need to be 5.0% of GDP higher than is currently projected.

The report, Opportunity Knocks, has been published today by London-based think tank International Longevity Centre-UK (ILC-UK), in conjunction with the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Engineering Design Centre at the University of Cambridge.

It points out that predictions for the growth in healthcare productivity are optimistic given historic trends, and that technological innovation will be vital to fill the gap. The authors argue that there is significant potential for responding to the challenges of ageing through new developments in wearable technologies, big data, 3D printing, cloud computing, the internet of things, and smart cities.

“Technological innovation is vital to help individuals and society as a whole adapt to ageing,” said Mike Bradley of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, which pioneered the Inclusive Design approach: designing products to be useful to as many people as possible. “But there are still many barriers to be overcome.”

The report suggests that a design response to ageing can also benefit the UK economy: Those over 65 spend around £2.2 billion per week and they could be spending over £6 billion per week (£312 billion per year) by 2037.

However, one in three 85-89 year olds has difficulty shopping for groceries and more than one in ten in this age group has difficulty managing money. More than half of those aged 90 and over have difficulty shopping for groceries and a quarter of this age group have difficulty managing money. Four in ten individuals over 75 and three quarters of individuals over 85 do not have internet access.

The report highlights a range of ideas for new technology which emerged from a workshop organised by ILC-UK, IET and The Engineering Design Centre at The University of Cambridge. The ideas are designed not as ‘solutions to ageing’ but to highlight the potential for innovation in focusing on this consumer group.

• A kettle which monitors blood pressure
• TV ‘buddies’ to allow people to remotely share the experience of watching a programme
• A ‘cuddle cushion’ which would allow relatives being able to send each other cuddles
• A smart water bottle which would prompt people to drink more to prevent dehydration
• Accessible and modern ‘Boris Scooters’ (or Segways) in towns and cities to help people with mild mobility impairments get around
• The development of national ‘trusted information’ systems for online and telephone transactions to reduce the risk of scams

“This report champions the positive impact that technology and design will play in helping us all to live longer, healthier, independent lives. However, we acknowledge that the potential of technology has not been fully realised. We also have to dispel the myth that this is simply a matter of niche solutions for an ageing society,” said Gordon Attenborough, the Institution of Engineering and Technology’s Head of Sectors.

“There’s so much more that we should achieve through the widespread application of existing and emerging technologies. It’s vital that we design and innovate with a broad range of users in mind, wholly inclusive and accessible to all. Achieve that and technology will mitigate the impending costs of an ageing society and deliver the promise it has failed to so far.

David Sinclair, Director of the International Longevity Centre – UK added: “Technology undoubtedly offers significant potential to help respond to the challenges of ageing. But the opportunity of technological innovation in this area has historically been over egged and under realised. For us to maximise the potential of new technologies however we need more evidence on what really works and whether it will save money. We need regulation which protects consumers while not preventing technological innovation. And we need industry to recognise the potential of the older consumer and design for all. Finally, we need a public debate on the challenges and opportunities of using big data to improve the lives of older people.”

Professor John Clarkson, Director of the Engineering Design Centre at Cambridge: “This report highlights that there is a huge commercial opportunity for companies to design inclusively, driving increased customer satisfaction and boosting their market share by delivering more competitive products and services.”

The report also highlights some ideas to maximise the potential of the sharing economy to support our ageing society.

Cooking buddies

A barcode scanner in the home could be used to upload the contents of your fridge to an interface which would share the information with your neighbours. Taking a peek in to each other’s fridges, seeing what people had a surplus of or what was about to go out of date, could encourage neighbours to cook together making meal times more sociable.

Integrated leisure and transport

Leisure activities, such as a trip to the theatre or to a restaurant, could come with transport included. When you book a ticket there could be the option to also book transport. If a large number of people were also booking transport to an event a mini-bus could then be sent to collect them all at a much lower costs than them all booking taxis separately.

Adapted from a ILC-UK press release. 

The technique, reported in the journal Nature Communications, could help in the diagnosis of these conditions in at-risk patients and in the development of new medicines.

Atherosclerosis – hardening of the arteries – is a potentially serious condition where arteries become clogged by a build-up of fatty deposits known as ‘plaques’. One of the key constituents in these deposits is calcium. In some people, pieces from the calcified artery can break away – if the artery supplies the brain or heart with blood, this can lead to stroke or heart attack.

“Hardening, or ‘furring’, of the arteries can lead to very serious disease, but it’s not clear why the plaques are stable in some people but unstable in others,” explains Professor David Newby, the BHF John Wheatley Professor of Cardiology at the Centre for Cardiovascular Science, University of Edinburgh. “We need to find new methods of identifying those patients at greatest risk from unstable plaques.”

The researchers injected patients with sodium fluoride that had been tagged with a tiny amount of a radioactive tracer. Using a combination of scanning techniques (positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT)), the researchers were able to track the progress of the tracer as it moved around the body.

“Sodium fluoride is commonly found in toothpaste as it binds to calcium compounds in our teeth’s enamel,” says Dr Anthony Davenport from the Department of Experimental Medicine and Immunotherapeutics at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. “In a similar way, it also binds to unstable areas of calcification in arteries and so we’re able to see, by measuring the levels of radioactivity, exactly where the deposits are building up. In fact, this new emerging technique is the only imaging platform that can non-invasively detect the early stages of calcification in unstable atherosclerosis.”

Following their sodium fluoride scans, the patients had surgery to remove calcified plaques and the extracted tissue was imaged, this time at higher resolution, using a laboratory PET/CT scanner and an electron microscope. This confirmed that the radiotracer accumulates in areas of active, unstable calcification whilst avoiding surrounding tissue.

Dr James Rudd, a cardiologist and researcher from the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Cambridge adds: “Sodium fluoride is a simple and inexpensive radiotracer that should revolutionise our ability to detect dangerous calcium in the arteries of the heart and brain. This will allow us to use current treatments more effectively, by giving them to those patients at highest risk. In addition, after further work, it may be possible to use this technique to test how well new medicines perform at preventing the development of atherosclerosis.”

The Wellcome Trust provided the majority of support for this study, with additional contributions from the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research UK and the Cambridge NIHR Biomedical Research Centre.

Reference
Irkle, A et al. Identifying active vascular microcalcification by 18F-sodium fluoride positron emission tomography. Nature Communications; 7 July 2015.