A new interdisciplinary institute at Imperial receives its first outside grant: to develop a snake-like surgical robot.
Andrea Chipman
Imperial College’s Institute for Biomedical Engineering has won a £2.1 million grant from the Wellcome Trust to develop the i-Snake, an innovative ‘keyhole’ surgery robot.
The award represents the first significant outside grant for the Institute, which opened in July 2007 and has technology transfer as its main mission.
The i-Snake employs a new form of sensing mechatronics, including articulated joints for greater navigation and flexibility, according to Professor Guang-Zhong Yang, director of medical imaging and robotics at the Institute. The device can be used for both imaging and for surgical procedures with the attachment of cutting and probing tools, he added.
“The adaptation of the robot will enable the expansion of robotic-assisted procedures such as intra-cardiac or intra-vascular diagnostic and therapeutic procedures,” Yang said. “The device itself is a completely new design, and allows full articulation of the instrument, enabling access to areas that were traditionally difficult to reach.”
The multidisciplinary team developing the i-Snake is headed by Yang and Health Minister Lord Ara Darzi, a professor of surgery, oncology, reproductive biology and anaesthetics at Imperial, and one of the country’s leading surgeons in the area of minimum invasive surgery.
Yang (left) and Darzi (right) discuss the i-Snake.
Although the device is currently only a design prototype, the Wellcome Trust’s grant will allow the team to test the device in the laboratory within four years.
“In terms of Wellcome funding, this is one of the first major engineering-focused instrument design projects to be a strategic translational award,” Yang added. “It’s unique because it has a very clear clinical drive.”
The grant allows the institute to develop the i-Snake technology to a level where it can attract venture capital or industrial investment necessary to take it to market, said Ted Bianco, the Wellcome Trust’s Director for Technology Transfer. The Institute wants to get the device to a marketable stage within a decade.
The Wellcome award recognizes the value of the interdisciplinary research the Institute is undertaking, Bianco said.
“We are a biomedical charity and it’s often quite frustrating when a concept has come out of a technologist’s mind without them having a clinical understanding of the problem they are trying to solve,” he said. “How Imperial organized themselves to bring their engineering and their clinical expertise together made this crucially important to their bid. What was really strong, was the integration.”
Technology transfer is the newest of the Wellcome Trust’s three divisions and was established in 2002. The division expects to award around £20 million of funding annually, Bianco said. The Trust as a whole spends approximately £600 million a year on research awards.
Image courtesy of Imperial College London.