• Question: What is the most famous thing that you have ever engineered?

    Asked by nhswillr1 to Alex, Claire, Kate, Marcus, Neil on 20 Jun 2014.
    • Photo: Marcus Johns

      Marcus Johns answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I’m afraid I haven’t engineered anything of note yet. The research that I’m carrying out is in a very new subject area (the term tissue engineering was first used in 1993 but 20 years really isn’t that long a period of time in the world of research) so there isn’t much that is famous at the moment from it, plus I’ve only been working at it for a year most of which has been spent looking at how to create the material – I haven’t got on to modifying it for heart cell growth yet!

    • Photo: Claire Brockett

      Claire Brockett answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      I haven’t *quite* engineered anything famous myself, but I have done some testing and development on a total knee replacement that is now in use – so there are patients wandering around with knee replacements that I contributed towards (in a small part).
      Hopefully in the future, the research we’re doing will have a big effect on ankle treatment, but for now it’s just a little contribution to something!

    • Photo: Alex Lyness

      Alex Lyness answered on 21 Jun 2014:

      Hey nhswillr1,

      That’s a cheeky question as we’re all really yet to get going on our careers!

      The most successful thing I’ve worked on so far was during my PhD. I worked for a company called Glide on their needle-free technology. Their website can be seen here: http://www.glidepharma.com/

      I helped understand the forces and speeds required to get through human skin, with and without needles. Glide are doing very well now and got £16m funding last year. Not bad considering there was only about 14 of us their during my PhD.

      One day I hope that people will invest that much money in one of my ideas and I can start my own company! 🙂

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