Chris Toumazou on inventing medical devices

The Life Scientific

BBC

Technology, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2014

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

European Inventor of the Year, Chris Toumazou, reveals how his personal life and early research lie at the heart of his inventions. As Chief Scientist at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, Chris inspires engineers, doctors and other scientists to create medical devices for the 21st century. Applying silicon chip technology, more commonly found inside mobile phones, he tackles seemingly insurmountable problems in medicine to create devices that bridge the electronic and biological worlds - from a digital plaster that monitors a patient's vital signs to an artificial pancreas to treat diabetes. His latest creation, coined a 'lab on a chip', analyses a person's DNA within minutes outside the laboratory. The hand-held device can identify genetic differences which dictate a person's susceptibility to hereditary diseases and how they will react to a drug like warfarin, used to treat blood clots. Producer: Beth Eastwood.

Transcript

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0:34.0	My guest today straddles two worlds.
0:37.0	Chris Tomazu is both a scientist and an inventor.
0:41.0	Most mornings he says an idea will just come to him as he wakes up and some of those ideas have turned into inventions
0:47.6	winning him awards most recently the prestigious European inventor of the year for his creation of a DNA microchip
0:55.2	a handheld device which tests for genetic diseases or how a person will react to a
1:00.4	particular drug. Chris's interest in silicon chips and electronic circuits
1:05.4	began in his late teens when he was training to be an electrician. Tinkering with
1:10.9	these circuits and problem solving sparked a passion for electronic engineering that has never waned.
1:17.0	By the age of just 33 he was made a professor of engineering, the youngest ever at Imperial College London. Today, Chris applies silicon-chip
1:25.9	technology in a completely novel way, creating medical devices for the 21st century. At the
1:32.3	Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College
1:35.0	where he's chief scientist, engineers work side by side with medics and other
1:39.8	scientists. Always keen to inspire his team to think outside the box he's been known to
1:44.8	explain with enthusiasm at the lab bench let's be disruptive. Chris Tomazu
1:50.3	welcome to the life Scientific. Thank you.
	...

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