Christofer Toumazou heads up a new multidisciplinary institute that provides a common working space for engineers and medical clinicians to help advance healthcare.

Andrea Chipman

In July this year, the Queen opened the £28 million Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College. Housed in a 4500 square-meter building that includes four open-plan laboratories and a bionanotechnology centre, the Institute hosts 40 doctoral and 16 postdoctoral students and has five joint appointments at lectureship level, drawing from the faculties of Medicine, Engineering and Natural sciences.

Institute Director Christofer Toumazou= is an electrical engineer who spent nearly 20 years developing low-power silicon chips for mobile and radio technology. He talks to Nature Network London about the background of the Institute and its commercial goals.

How did you first get into this field?

About five or six years ago, a Canadian company approached me to see if I could apply my low-power silicon technology to cochlear implants. We made one of the world’s lowest power chips to replace the basilar membrane in the inner ear; it could be powered with a coil similar to a toothbrush charger.

That demonstrated to me that if you just apply a fraction of the technology used in the silicon mobile arena to healthcare, you could make major innovations. One of my personal inspirations was that my son, now 16, was diagnosed with renal failure when he was 13. He was on dialysis for two and a half years before he had a transplant, and we went through the whole chronic disease management, including home dialysis, based on a timing system.

One [of our] projects involves making biosensors that measure creatinine levels in the blood. If creatinine levels could determine levels of dialysis, then you’ve got a physiological closed loop system, personalised to the patient. The devices are small enough and low-powered enough that they could be mass-produced.

What was the impetus behind the Institute?

Richard Sykes, the former Glaxo Chair came to be rector of Imperial College about six years ago, and suggested that I head the Department of Biomedical Engineering. We had a department within Imperial comprising staff from various disciplines—aeronautical engineers working on heart pumps and heart valves and mechanical engineers on robots, robotic surgery, orthopedics and implants. On another level, we had biochemists and other life scientists. It struck me that we needed to mix cellular level life sciences with hardcore engineering and medicine. There was a huge critical mass of activity where people were working in biomedical problems but not in a large-scale way.

Sykes created a faculty system and a layer of management that could help manage interfaces between faculties in large-scale programs, which meant I had the scope to form a college-scale model for bioresearch that fit between the faculty of engineering and the faculty of medicine. We have the largest medical and engineering schools in Europe, we’re all in the same setting and we have the critical mass to do some extremely exciting large-scale research.

*How does the Institute work on a day-to-day level? *

What’s unique about it is that we can have students and postgraduates from all different disciplines working in the same lab—biochemists, engineers and neurologists for example. The Institute has facilities for medical staff and professors to come in and interact with engineers and scientists to solve problems. The only other university starting to get a bit of traction in this area is Oxford.

Heart surgeon Sir Magdy Yacoub showed a particular project to the queen, a device we had patented a few years ago, using a surface acoustic wave device—a kind of quartz used in mobiles on a very small chip that will allow blood pressure to be monitored continuously in real time. Magdy is keen to implant the device in the left ventricle once he has operated on patients with heart transplants or patients with artificial hearts. Like bar tags in supermarkets, a signal is sent wirelessly and the return signal is the difference between the incoming signal and blood pressure.

What are the main areas of focus for the Institute?

The Institute has three core activities. One is personalized healthcare—bionics and biological electronics. Another is bio-nanontechnology—trying to create very small sensors and lab-on-a-chip technology, such as miniaturised old bucket chemistry or microfluidics mixed with very low-power cellular technologies. The third activity is medical imaging and robots.

Effectively, one example of bio-nanotechnology we are looking at is creating a device that measures a patient’s genetic mutations, which are related to hereditary disease. To create the technology, one needs to extract small samples of DNA from a cheek swab or blood sample or fluid, do some biochemistry that will sequence the DNA in a nano-micro way, on chip, and give a readout, which will indicate whether the patient is predisposed to diseases.

A whole database of SNPs are being created and not only for genetic diseases; for particular drugs, you can tell if a patient can metabolize a certain drug more easily. It’s genetics on the go and a real gain for rapid point-of-care results.

One of the Institute’s spin-outs, DNA Electronics, is exploiting this field. In the area of medical imaging and robotics, we have one of two DaVinci robots and we’re working on ways of making robots and surgical tools more dexterous. Prime Minister Gordon Brown had a go with the robot about two weeks ago, using it to cut an artificial piece of flesh.

What other products are you trying to commercialize?

Another more generic technology is a digital plaster device developed by my own technology company. We have developed a low-power silicon chip that can be powered by a very low-power battery made of zinc air power paper [a zinc magnesium dioxide battery embedded on a paper-like substrate, which is modeled as a patch (plaster) by Toumaz Technology to provide the power of a wireless low power and disposable vital sign monitor.]. The size of it is such that it could be disguised as a band-aid. It’s acting as power source for a silicon chip, which is also a vital sign monitor. It monitors full ECG activity, movement and respiratory breathing, and also blood pressure.

The idea is that a patient with a chronic disease and who needs continuous monitoring, sticks the device onto their chest and it wirelessly sends the vital signs of the ECG. If there is a variability, it will activate an alarm and send an SMS message to the consultant, GP or hospital. The day’s data of ECG will then be downloaded wirelessly. Once the data is analyzed by a consultant, the alarm might just turn out to be an anomaly. If it’s a consistent problem, the patient will be called into the hospital. It’s a way of enabling patients to go about their daily life.

What challenges do you face in working with traditional technology companies?

With the digital plaster device, we’re working with a disposable plaster manufacturer. For them, it’s a disruption [of their traditional business model] but they need to be in this space because that’s how new technology is going to evolve. These technologies are part of an end-to-end multi-disciplinary system. You can’t just go to Boots and buy a digital plaster, which needs to have a low-power mobile connection to a PDA or mobile phone. There are international standards being set up around end-to-end play of all the wireless technologies used in medical arena. The Continua Network is a big U.S. consortium for digital health that includes Intel and Siemens Medical. The Institute of Biomedical Engineering is the only non-corporate part of this consortium.

Image courtesy of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering