Anyone looking at a bubble-- it seems to make them happy.
They offer such amazing potential for engineering.
They're part gas.
They're part liquid.
They float.
And yet they're solid enough that you
can manipulate them to do things.
Our main focus is finding better ways
to deliver drugs to the body, though at the moment,
for the vast majority of diseases, if you're given
a drug, you're given it as a pill or an injection.
And it goes throughout your bloodstream.
Every cell in your body, pretty much, is exposed to that drug.
If I say that the complexity of what we do
is the same as the complexity if you were designing a car,
I wouldn't be exaggerating.
I love London.
It's always fun to wander around and find quirky bits of London,
and just shoot for myself.
I didn't really know anything about chemotherapy.
I had no idea that it's so toxic that the nurses have
to wear protective clothing while they're injecting you.
You are poisoning the body.
You're being systematically, seriously poisoned.
What we're trying to do is create
a means of delivering those drugs just where they
need to go.
For example, in the case of cancer,
we need to get those drugs just to the cells within the tumour.
We don't want them going everywhere else.
You're so badly poisoned that your immune system doesn't
work.
Even a cold can kill you.
And in fact, the chemotherapy scared me
more than the idea of having cancer.
The bubbles do a number of things.
Firstly, they act as a great vehicle
for putting the drugs in.
The drug stays within the bubble until we release it,
and so it avoids it going everywhere
else around the body.
Some of our bubbles that we make are magnetic,
so we can actually drag them into a location using a magnet.
We then use ultrasound to get the bubbles to start vibrating.
The vibration of the bubble actually
helps to pump the drug further into the tissue
than it would otherwise go.
We get a much more effective distribution of the drug
throughout the tumour.
The first time that worked in an experiment,
and we got this huge increase in the amount of drug delivered,
that was tremendously exciting.
I have chronic fatigue, because my body was so badly
hurt by the chemotherapy.
If there was a way of doing this differently,
then I could have had my life back.
It makes me jealous to think other people might
be able to be treated for the same kind of cancer as I had,
and they wouldn't have to contend
with what I have to contend with now.
It's hard.
We've got lots of talented people doing maths and physics,
doing brilliantly, and not realising that they can have
such an exciting career applying that in engineering,
and somehow we've got to change that.
It does allow you to change people's lives
and the way the world works.
And there are so many huge problems
that need addressing in the world.
Engineering has got a massive role to play in that,
and the more people that realise that,
and that we can encourage to come and solve these problems,
the better.