Together with partners including: the Babraham Research Campus, the Milner Therapeutics Institute, the Maxwell Centre, the departments of engineering and psychiatry at Cambridge University, Vellos, Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and Cambridge Network), CUHP has entered a three-year collaboration with cutting-edge science funding government agency ARIA, to engineer a new generation of neuro-technologies that include miniaturised brain implants designed to treat depression, dementia, chronic pain, epilepsy and injuries to the nervous system.
Neurological and mental health disorders will affect four in every five people in their lifetimes, and present a greater overall health burden than cancer and cardiovascular disease combined. For example, twenty-eight million people in the UK are living with chronic pain and one point three million people with traumatic brain injury.
Neuro-technology – where technology is used to control the nervous system – has the potential to deliver revolutionary new treatments for these disorders, in much the same way that heart pacemakers, cochlear implants and spinal implants have transformed medicine in recent decades. The technology can be in the form of electronic brain implants that reset abnormal brain activity or help deliver drugs more effectively, brain-computer interfaces that control prosthetic limbs, or cutting-edge techniques that train the patient’s own cells to fight disease.
The science of building technology small enough, precise enough and cheap enough to make a global impact requires an environment where the very best minds from across the UK can collaborate, dream up radical, risky ideas and test them without fear of failure. The Cambridge NeuroWorks programme is not just for academics, it is open to creative people from all backgrounds, sectors and locations.
