A Teddington lab has launched a new centre to improve early diagnosis and treatment of conditions such as cancer, dementia and heart disease.

The launch at The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), on Friday February 23, comes at a time when 50 per cent of people born after 1960 are expected to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetimes.

Proton therapy, the gold-standard for treating cancer in children, has seen £250 million of investment by the NHS and this year proton therapy is coming to The Christie hospital in Manchester, meaning children can have NHS proton therapy in the UK for the first time.

Richard Amos, associate professor and research lead for clinical proton physics at UCL, said: “One of the reasons we are believed to have worse overall outcomes for cancer [compared to countries with similar wealth] is that the UK is viewed as being slower to adopt new technology.

“We have been devising phantoms that mimic parts of the body; sometimes we use 3D printing technology to check that radiation is being delivered to the right place and not to healthy tissue.”

NPL use their state-of-the-art 3D printing techniques to create ‘phantoms’ of organs which contain sensors and are used to measure the dose of protons (or radiation) being delivered to tumours, which will improve precision and outcomes for patients.

These ‘phantoms’ could also potentially reduce the number of animals used in research.

NPL is also developing a new type of ultrasound imagining system that will be less painful and better at diagnosing cancer in younger women, who have denser breasts which makes it hard to distinguish between normal tissue and tumours.

The technology scans the whole breast, immersed in warm water, and is being trialled in Bristol next month.