Co-location is the key to realising BioQuarter vision

Professor Kev Dhaliwal, Chair of Molecular Imaging and Healthcare Technology, Centre for Inflamation Research, University of Edinburgh

During Edinburgh BioQuarter’s online Bidders’ Day, Professor Kev Dhaliwal, consultant respiratory physician in infection and interventional medicine, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, explained to Real Asset Media how the BioQuarter will accelerate medical progress by engendering wide-scale collaboration.

Using the example of his own specialism, primarily imaging tools for tackling lung disease, Dhaliwal explained that the BioQuarter’s goal is to accelerate the pace of development of medical solutions by co-locating experts in different disciplines such as technologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, biologists and clinicians, alongside the patients themselves.

Crucially, entrepreneurial networks are also required to enable commercialisation of new developments, the generation of new enterprises and the formation of new industrial partnerships, he said.

Bringing such disciplines together initiates the “cross pollination” required and engenders cultural change: “we need to focus on fighting disease, not each other,” Dhaliwal says.

The benefits have already been demonstrated. Dhaliwal’s research and development of new fibre-optic based technologies to understand lung disease were already underway when Covid19 struck but this initiative has been pivoted into the campaign to help in the bid to halt the pandemic.

The full interview is available as a video, or download and listen as a podcast: