Smith & Nephew Plc (LON:SN) and Imperial College London have launched a five-year partnership to deliver breakthrough research and innovation for robotic surgery for musculoskeletal conditions.
The first-in-kind partnership will bring together a globally renowned academic laboratory 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 and more intuitive and usable by more than just the specialist centres, leading to better outcomes for patients.
The centre’s launch marks both the first time that UK multinational Smith & Nephew has founded a centre of this kind within a university, and Imperial’s first industry centre in the field of medical technology.
Departing from traditional models of innovation in medical technology, which is usually carried out by companies or licensed from universities, Smith & Nephew’s experts will work directly with university researchers to co-develop new solutions and will use its scale to bring the cutting-edge techniques to adoption more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.
The new centre will be led Professor Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena in Imperial’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, co-director of the Hamlyn Centre, whose group works on robotics for orthopaedic surgery. At full capacity, the centre will support a senior postdoctoral researcher and up to seven fully-funded PhD studentships, recruited progressively across the five-year programme, working with Smith & Nephew engineers and clinicians in the same space.
The new university technology centre will be situated within Imperial’s Hamlyn Centre, part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and a driver of research in robotic surgery.
Research will focus on making robotic surgery less invasive and available beyond specialist centres. Research topics include markerless registration and tracking, which removes the pins and rigid markers that current systems bolt to bone, meaning fewer incisions and less hardware for the patient, and better consistency for the surgeon. Another topic is computer vision that reads and adapts to a patient’s anatomy in real time.
Vasant Padmanabhan, President of Research & Development, ENT and Emerging Markets at Smith & Nephew, said, “In Smith & Nephew’s 170th year, we are proud to partner with a university that embodies a similar heritage in UK medical innovation. By embedding industry experts within one of the world’s leading engineering schools, this centre has the potential to move research into operating theatres at pace, transforming patient outcomes and enhancing the surgical experience.”
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 spinout 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 hold major impact for the medical technology industry as a whole and its patients.”
Professor Mary Ryan, Vice-Provost (Research and Enterprise) at Imperial College London, said, “Working directly with Smith & Nephew, will allow us to bring advanced innovations rapidly to the clinic, drawing on Imperial’s world-leading academic expertise and the company’s resources and sectoral knowledge. We look forward to further expanding our large-scale partnerships with industry in this space and bringing innovations in medical technology to patients more quickly.”
