With new start-ups, fresh partnerships and a recently appointed Co-director, it’s shaping up to be a big year for those who study the very small.
Andrea Chipman
On July 4, the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) signed a memorandum of understanding with Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, increasing collaboration between the two. The move followed LCN’s appointment of a materials scientist, Dr David McComb, as Co-director in May, and is the latest step in the centre’s effort to build links between the physical and biomedical sciences and develop commercially viable products for the IT, healthcare and energy markets.
Launched in November 2006 as a joint enterprise between Imperial College and University College London, LCN allows both founding institutions to pool their resources and take advantage of their urban location.
“The whole idea of the partnership is that either of the two colleges by themselves cannot compete internationally, but together we can,” says Co-director Gabriel Aeppli, an MIT-trained electrical engineer who previously worked for information technology and communications firms including IBM and AT&T. “In the different colleges, we have different levels of expertise, and in recruiting, we have chosen to develop different abilities.”
An Urban Locale
LCN’s systemic focus and its multidisciplinary research base put it in a strong position to take advantage of its London location, with its myriad of industries that maintain a high demand for technological solutions.
“We’re not trying to behave like Berkeley or Cambridge or Oxford,” Aeppli said. “We have no space and cannot expand, which is a disadvantage that limits those things that we do, but we take advantage of the high density of good problems and scientists, particularly biomedical scientists [in London].”
The centre, which operates from two campuses in South Kensington and Bloomsbury, is funded with public money from the European Union and scientific research councils, and by private contributions from the Wolfson Foundation. A recently completed, state-of-the-art research centre in Bloomsbury was funded 75% by UCL and 25% by Imperial.
Healthcare and environment top future opportunities
While nanotechnology is being applied to a number of industrial sectors, the areas of medical science and energy and the environment are likely to offer the most lucrative prospects for LCN in the near term, according to the Co-directors.
The interdisciplinary approach is particularly effective in treating medical challenges such as osteoporosis, said McComb, a materials scientist with degrees in chemistry and physics.
“We’re bringing together experts in medicine and bone diseases, plus people from physics, chemistry with knowledge of characterization and how structures are built up at the atomic level, so they can build a new view of what happens in the disease,” he added.
Another LCN project is devoted to automated stem cell sorting, which identifies various properties of stem cells that can then be used as fingerprints to automate the sorting process.
Spin-offs and startups
Meanwhile, LCN already has its first spin-off, Endomagnetics . The company has developed a probe to locate lymph nodes using magnetic nanoparticles, to help surgeons assess and implement treatment for breast cancer. The product is currently in clinical trials.
On the environmental side, the centre is seeking to build on Imperial College’s experience in fuel cell research, which led to the formation of spin-off Ceres Power .
“Current fuel cell technology operates at a high temperature which impacts its performance and puts limits on how you can use it,” McComb said. “We need to lower the temperature of the fuel cells and engineer materials you use for electrodes and ion-conducting electrolytes on a very fine scale. We can engineer the materials and interfaces between them using nanotechnology.”
The commercial exploitation of LCN’s research is one of the key priorities for McComb and Aeppli. They expect Endomagnetics to be the first of many such companies to emerge from the centre. LCN is already forming a second start-up, the Bio Nano Centre, which will provide prototyping and consulting services for London’s medical research industry.