Sir Paul Nurse
The Hamlyn Centre’s latest addition, the Wolfson Laboratory for Robot Assisted Microsurgery, was officially opened by Sir Paul Nurse, President of the Royal Society, on Monday 16 April.
The new lab has been made possible through funding totalling £5m from both the Wolfson Foundation and the National Institute of Health Research.
The Hamlyn Centre, which is part of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and is split across three Imperial campuses – South Kensington, St Mary’s and Northwick Park. It has been refurbished with new technologies for development of novel microsurgery, pre-clinical and training facilities integrated into the Surgical Innovation Centre at St Mary’s Hospital, and a pre-clinical imaging suite for clinical trials to enable clinicians and technicians to validate new surgical robots in the patient. The long-term hope is that the robots in the Hamlyn Centre will be integrated with imaging and sensing technologies to perform microsurgery for a range of minimally invasive surgical procedures.
Janet Wolfson de Botton, Chairman of the Wolfson Foundation, said:
"The Wolfson Foundation has a long tradition of funding excellence in science and technology and we are very pleased to support the Hamlyn Centre in advancing robot assisted microsurgery."
Lord Darzi, Chair of the Institute and co-director of the Hamlyn Centre, said:
"We are very grateful to the Wolfson Foundation and NIHR for their generous contribution to the refurbishments of the Hamlyn Centre. This will allow us to build on our unique strengths in research and clinical application of minimal invasive surgery and allied technology by enhancing both scientific discovery and translation into clinical practice with clear benefit to patient recovery and quality of life. The new lab will also enable our multidisciplinary team to create micro-surgical tools for new surgical procedures with improved accuracy and efficacy.”
Professor Guang-Zhong Yang, Director of the Hamlyn Centre, commented:
“None of this would be possible without the generous funding that underpins our core resources from the Helen Hamlyn Trust. The funding we have received creates a unique opportunity for our teams of scientists, clinicians and engineers in terms of developing new robotic devices which focuses on safe, effective and accessible technologies with direct patient benefit.“
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