Delivering nanotechnology to the healthcare, IT and environmental sectors — A perspective from the ‘London centre for nanotechnology’

Nanotechnology research is booming worldwide, having an impact on multiple sectors and with a general belief that medical and biological applications will form the greatest area of expansion over the next decade, driven by an attempt to bring radical solutions to areas of unmet medical need. What is true in the USA is also being fulfilled in Europe, though generally at a significantly lower investment level, even for ’large’ capital infrastructure and interdisciplinary centres. Against this, the UK and its European partners are following the maxim ’small is beautiful’ and are attempting to identify and grow academic research and commercial businesses in areas that traditional nanotechnology developments out of engineering or physics find challenging. Thus, University College London and Imperial College, in a major joint project linked to other centres of excellence both in the UK and in the rest of Europe, are building upon their internationally competitive medical and hard-matter research activities to focus on and develop nanotechnology as a major sector of research activity. The two universities together form one of the largest centres of biomedical research outside the USA. A novel approach to commercialisation has been taken, exemplified by the establishment with government and private equity funds of a ‘Bionanotechnology Centre’ — this will act as a portal for UK industry to access specialist skills to solve issues relating to developing nanotechnology-based medical applications, for example, for environmental screening, diagnostics and therapy. This paper reviews our academic and business strategy with examples from our current research portfolio, biased towards medicine as the London Centre for Nanotechnology’s most rapidly growing area.