Air pollution and medical networks: News from Imperial

Image of cars to show rising air pollution. Credit: Shutterstock

Here’s a batch of fresh news and announcements from across Imperial.

From a new instrument that measures the impact of pollution on people’s health to a new network for synthetic cell research, here is some quick-read news from across Imperial. 

Measuring harmful pollution particles 

Researchers from the School of Public Health have developed a new instrument that measures how harmful the tiny particles in the air are for people’s health. The instrument assesses how much damage the particles can potentially cause, by simulating how the body would chemically respond to them.  

Established approaches involve sampling onto filters over 24-hour periods, but the new instrument measures continuously, every five minutes. This allows for more accurate and timely data and allows scientists to see what pollution sources are most important. When it was tested in central London it demonstrated that the impact of different sources could be identified, even at particle concentrations known to be within the World Health Organization's ‘safe’ levels. 

Dr Steven Campbell, who led the study, said: “Understanding how air pollution forms and harms people is a key part of Imperial’s work in addressing the impact of pollution on people’s health, globally. This new instrument will be invaluable for that.”

Read more about the research in Science Direct.  

Drugging the undruggable 

Professors Sophia Yaliraki, Ed Tate and Dr Louise Walport (Department of Chemistry), Dr Matthew Child (Department of Life Science) and Professor Mauricio Barahona (Department of Mathematics) have been awarded £250,000 in funding from the President’s Excellence Fund to carry out new research in ‘undruggable’ proteins. 

This project brings together interdisciplinary expertise and techniques to identify new druggable sites within challenging protein targets. These proteins are linked to diseases, particularly in oncology and immunology, yet they have proven resistant to traditional drug design.  

By combining novel computational techniques to identify these new sites for drug targeting, experimental validation and drug discovery, the team hopes to advance their approach toward therapeutic solutions for proteins previously deemed undruggable. 

“This is blue skies research, a project that is high-risk and high reward,” said Professor Yaliraki. 

New medical network 

Dr Claudia Contini, from our Department of Life Sciences, is one of the beneficiaries of a new doctoral network aiming to use synthetic cell replicas to understand cellular mechanisms at the basis of neurodegenerative diseases and accelerate drug discovery and research new medical treatments. 

The Condensates at Membrane Scaffolds - Integrated Systems as Synthetic Cell Compartments project, which has the acronym ComeInCell, is funded by the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and the UK Guarantee Scheme. 

Academia and industry have joined forces to train 17 PhD students in eight different countries in long-term transferable skills, practical experience at partnering biotechnology companies, software development and analytical instrumentation. This international and interdisciplinary programme aims to train future biomedical and biotechnology researchers to explore cellular mechanisms with advanced synthetic models. 

Dr Contini said: "This network represents a pivotal moment for advancing synthetic cell research at Imperial and internationally.” 

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