Imperial College has awarded Tate group a grant to work on fluorescent probes for cancer surgery

The Imperial Confidence in Concept (ICiC) grant has been awarded to support the development of fluorescent probes for the visualisation of tumours during cancer surgery. The grant was awarded based on preliminary research performed within the Tate group by Dr Daniel Lucy, in collaboration with Mr Daniel Leff and Prof. Daniel Elson, of the Department of Surgery and Cancer. Together, this collaboration is enabling the development of cutting-edge real-time breast cancer imaging technology which is hoped to ultimately be used to increase accuracy in surgical removal of breast tumours, and potentially other cancers too.

The ICiC grant aims to provide commercially interesting research ideas with seed funding to enable the development of technology to meet an unmet market need. The commercial potential of this research is also being explored by Dr Lucy through participation in Imperial College's flagship entrepreneurial Techcelerate programme where he is conducting customer discovery to validate the market for the technology in development.

The ICiC funding will allow work in this area to continue. This will be done in collaboration between Dr Lucy (Tate group) and the Leff and Elson laboratories.