Life science

For most people,  cancer research means the development of new drugs to treat the disease. These new drug discoveries are often met with exaggerated newspaper reports heralding them as a potential cancer cure. Much less attention tends to be paid to technology developments designed to help in the fight against the disease, although these can be every bit as vital.

‘Most of the advances you hear about in newspapers are biologically based. You often hear about these therapies very early on, and I suspect if you went back five years later and looked at which had worked you would find there were very few,’ said Prof Peter Williams, director of North Western Medical Physics at Christie Hospital Manchester, one of the largest cancer centres in Europe.

Williams, who is also president of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine, leads a team of around 60 scientists and engineers, of whom 40 specialise in cancer-related fields. Researchers working within the health service pride themselves on the applied nature of their work, and as a result almost all the team’s R&D results in useful technology, he said.