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The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Wellcome Trust are jointly funding four new centres of excellence in medical engineering.

Four interdisciplinary research teams - at Imperial College London, King’s College London, Leeds and Oxford universities - will receive a combined total of £41m over the next five years.

The funding will help teams of clinicians, biomedical scientists and engineers invent high-tech solutions that could potentially improve thousands of patients’ lives.

Researchers at Imperial College will receive almost £11m in funding to develop technologies to improve the lives of patients with osteoarthritis.

'We will create the next generation of hip and knee replacement implants that will last longer and require less invasive surgery to fit. Tissue engineering will also contribute hugely in this area, using patients’ own cells to grow new cartilage for osteoarthritic knees. A better understanding of the disease will also lead to new technologies to diagnose and treat osteoarthritis at a much earlier stage,' said Imperial's Prof Ross Ethier.