Profile: Peter Weinberg, Director of Research in Bioengineering

Professor Peter Weinberg talks about some exciting developments in the Department of Bioengineering, where he serves as Director of Research.

What's happening in Bioengineering at the moment?

Bioengineering is enjoying a period of remarkable growth. When I joined the Department in 2004, there were around 10 academic staff. Today there are over 30, and we are still expanding rapidly. Bioengineers commonly work on cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal injury and neurological problems, but now I am developing a cancer engineering initiative. There are similar schemes in the USA and we want to lead the way in the UK. We have started in a small way: the Faculty of Engineering and the Imperial Cancer Research UK Centre have jointly funded two interdisciplinary PhD projects which will start in October.

Will there be further collaborations of this kind?

We hope to attract funding for more students. They would have two or more supervisors, combining biomedical sciences and either engineering or physical sciences. It is an effective way to get different disciplines talking to each other. Academics are very busy, but if they jointly supervise a student then they have to get together to discuss research on a regular basis. With external funding we ultimately hope to establish a Centre of Cancer Engineering based in the cross-faculty Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

Who is really pushing the envelope in terms of cross-disciplinary thinking?

The Physical Science-Oncology Centers established in the US take cancer-related hypotheses from engineers and physical scientists that could be addressed with resources available to biomedical scientists and clinicians. This is exemplified by the work of theoretical physicist Professor Paul Davies of Arizona State University, who heads one of the US centres. He has proposed novel theories about the evolution of cancer that are based on our metazoan ancestry. Whether they are true or not, the point is that we need to change the way we think about cancer – the purely biological approach might have taken us as far as we can go now.