Come with us to the scene of innovative research and witness history in the making. Discover how a group of scientists at the Translational Healthcare Technologies Group have been able to tinker with UV and fibre optics to create a new cutting-edge piece of technology that will go on to save lives and treat infections and diseases. We have developed this using two things you can find in everyday life: fibre optics and UV light. Fibre optics are used to supply your internet in most areas now. Those same fibres lend themselves to be flexible thin instruments that can explore the body in less invasive ways than open surgical procedures.
UV light is bactericidal (kills bacteria), but it can also be cancer-causing, which is why we cover up or apply sunscreen at the beach. However, we’re planning to use a particular wavelength of UV that means we’ve lost the cancer-causing side of it, meaning what we have is powerful bacteria-killing light rays! We have combined the two to develop this world-changing piece of technology. The fibres, giving us the flexibility to reach places in the human body that are hard and dangerous to reach, such as the lung, and the UV gives us the ability to kill bacteria wherever we find them.
Together we can see this technology used for things that, soon, antibiotics may not be able to be used for due to the increase in super-bacteria’s resistance.