A new centre in the UK, created by Imperial College London and the MedTech company Smith+Nephew, is set to accelerate innovation in surgical robotics.
Marking a new approach to innovation in surgical robotics, the centre will bring advances under development by a leading surgical robotics research group to patients more quickly.
Imperial College London and Smith+Nephew recently launched a five-year partnership to deliver advances in robotic surgery for musculoskeletal conditions.
The first-of-its-kind partnership will bring together experts from Imperial with engineers from Smith+Nephew to accelerate the translation of academic breakthroughs in fields such as computer vision and sensing into advanced techniques in robotic surgery.
The techniques will be designed to make robotic surgery less invasive, more intuitive, and accessible beyond specialist centres, leading to better patient outcomes.
The centre’s launch marks the first time that UK multinational Smith+Nephew has established a centre of this kind at a university, and it is Imperial’s first industry research centre in medical technology.
Smith+Nephew’s experts will work directly with university researchers to co-develop new solutions and use its scale to accelerate the adoption of cutting-edge techniques more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.
The new centre will be led by Professor Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, of Imperial’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and co-director of the Hamlyn Centre. His group focuses on robotics for orthopaedic surgery.
At full capacity, the centre will support a senior postdoctoral researcher and up to seven fully funded PhD studentships, progressively recruited over the five-year programme, with Smith+Nephew engineers and clinicians in the same space.
The new university technology centre will be located within Imperial’s Hamlyn Centre, part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and a driver of research in robotic surgery.
Research topics include markerless registration and tracking, and computer vision that reads and adapts to a patient’s anatomy in real time.
Professor Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena from Imperial College London said: ‘Translational research on health devices has historically had two main routes to patients: licensing or spin-out companies. This centre establishes a third: academic engineers working hand in hand to help develop products with a major industry partner. There is no doubt that the innovations discovered within this centre will have a major impact on the medical technology industry and on its patients.’
