Surgeons have a favoured tool for removing breast tumours. The electrosurgical knife does not cut so much as burn. It uses an electrical current to vaporise tissue, so blood loss is minimised. The challenge for the surgeon is to remove all the cancer and leave only healthy tissue behind.
Zoltan Takats, a Hungarian researcher, came up with a striking improvement. He hooked an electrosurgical knife to an instrument called a mass spectrometer. Now, when the surgeon uses the knife, it sniffs the fumes from the seared flesh and tells the surgeon in real time whether the tissue is cancerous or healthy. It makes for better precision.
Takats had the idea in a chemistry lab in Germany. But to turn it into a working product, he had to move on. Armed with an EU grant, he took the work to Imperial College London, a leading centre for translational medicine. Now the iKnife technology is worth about $100m (£68m). It has been used in more than 80 operations and clinical trials will begin here soon.
Without EU funds of about €7m, Takats suspects the four-year project would have taken twice as long. “When I came over, I didn’t know even know if it would have any real value in medicine,” he said. With Britain in the EU, trials of the device here make sense. If approved in the UK, it can be marketed anywhere in Europe. If Britain leaves, that may not necessarily remain the case.
The EU backs many such researchers. In evidence given to a Lords inquiry, the Wellcome Trust noted that under the EU’s framework programme 7, spanning the period from 2007 to 2013, the UK won €6.1bn in grants, of which €947m was for medical research.
One researcher to benefit is Michael Schneider. He used an EU grant to move from the US to London to work on stem cells found in the heart. His team discovered that injections of cells could repair heart attack damage, a first step towards regenerating the organs. In another recent breakthrough, a UK-led effort found scores of genetic mutations linked to breast cancer that should help personalise treatment. The EU-funded project involved scientists from Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and France, as well as two from the US.
“This is what EU research does. It links up European countries and also pulls in US players to make big world-leading science,” said Mike Galsworthy at Scientists for EU.
According to Nick Meade at Genetic Alliance UK, collaborations and common regulations in Europe make a huge difference to research and treatment of rare genetic diseases. One country alone will have only a few patients and little expertise, but member states can pool patient records and share expertise. Under EU orphan drugs regulations, 114 treatments for rare diseases are available in the UK that might otherwise not be marketed. “EU membership comes into its own in the medical field,” said Meade.
