Engineering Precision Medicine for the 21st Century

由于人口老龄化以及癌症、中风和阿尔茨海默氏症等疾病的增加，英国正面临着一场护理危机。我们迫切需要更好的治疗方案来管理这些情况，防止过早死亡，使患者能够继续独立生活，并减轻护理提供者的负担。我们在拟议的研究中的目标是将来自不同领域的量子物理和药物化学的科学家与生物医学工程师和临床医生聚集在一起，以便提供这些解决方案。我们的方法是基于一项令人兴奋的新发现，即目前用作成像造影剂的微泡可以用低强度超声波刺激产生光，为提供靶向治疗提供了一种独特的方法。虽然几十年来，光激活疗法一直是临床前和临床研究的主题，但由于光对组织的穿透性差，它们的有效性受到了极大的阻碍。在我们的方法中，这个障碍被消除了。由于超声波可以从外部探头精确聚焦到人体几乎任何地方，因此可以远程非侵入性地触发光产生，以提供高度局部的治疗，并将非靶标毒性降至最低。这有可能改变癌症化疗、中风治疗、抗微生物药物以及免疫刺激和光遗传疗法等新疗法的交付方式。最初的概念验证阶段将侧重于量化微泡的光发射、药物激活的效率和超声波暴露条件的优化。我们的总体目标是开发一个完整的治疗系统，包括新的治疗药物以及治疗输送和监测系统，为临床开发做好准备。这将为一系列新的治疗方法提供基础，以在2050年前改变治疗提供方式。

The UK is facing a care crisis due to its aging population and the concomitant increase in diseases such as cancer, stroke and Alzheimer's. We urgently need better therapeutic solutions to manage these conditions, prevent premature deaths, enable patients to continue living independently and ease the burden on care providers. Our aim in the proposed research is to bring together scientists from the disparate fields of quantum physics and pharmaceutical chemistry, with biomedical engineers and clinicians in order to provide those solutions. Our approach is based upon the exciting new finding that microbubbles, currently used as imaging contrast agents can be stimulated with low intensity ultrasound to produce light, offering a unique method for delivery targeted therapy. Whilst photoactivated therapies have been the subject of both pre-clinical and clinical research for decades, their usefulness has been drastically hindered by the poor penetration of light through tissue. In our approach this barrier is eliminated. Since ultrasound can be precisely focused almost anywhere in the body from an external probe, light generation can be triggered remotely and non-invasively to deliver highly localised treatment with minimal off-target toxicity. This has the potential to transform the delivery of cancer chemotherapy, stroke treatment, antimicrobials and also newer treatments such as immunostimulatory and optogenetic therapies. The initial proof of concept phase will focus on quantification of the light emissions from microbubbles, the efficiency of drug activation and optimisation of the ultrasound exposure conditions. Our overall goal is to develop a complete treatment system, consisting of new therapeutic agents together with systems for treatment delivery and monitoring, ready for clinical development. This will provide the foundations for a pipeline of new treatments to transform therapeutic delivery by 2050.