Q-BIOMED expands partnerships and capabilities through Accelerating Capability Fund award

In March, the Chancellor announced a major new investment in UK quantum technologies, including an additional £13.8 million for the UK’s five National Quantum Research Hubs. This funding forms part of the government’s continued commitment to delivering the National Quantum Strategy and accelerating the translation of quantum research into real-world impact.

The Accelerating Capability Fund is a flexible funding mechanism designed to enable the Hubs to establish new partnerships, build critical technical capabilities, and respond rapidly to emerging opportunities aligned with the Strategy’s Missions. Funding will be delivered through multiple competitive rounds over the next four financial years.

This year, Q-BIOMED has been awarded £902,000 from EPSRC. This investment will support six targeted work packages, including partnerships with five new academic collaborators, and will strengthen the Hub’s ability to deliver clinically focused quantum technologies for healthcare.

Identifying and prioritising quantum sensing applications for healthcare

A major challenge in developing new technologies for healthcare is ensuring they are directed towards clearly defined, high-value clinical needs. Addressing this challenge underpins this work package, which will undertake a clinical needs mapping exercise.

Working in collaboration with UCLPartners, this work will focus on identifying where current approaches to diagnosis and monitoring fall short, and where more sensitive or precise measurement could improve clinical decision-making across care pathways.

Together, we will develop a clinically grounded view of where quantum sensing technologies have the greatest potential to add value, across diagnosis, monitoring and treatment, and where they do not offer a clear advantage over existing or emerging approaches.

This will help to guide future research and investment towards areas with the strongest potential to improve patient outcomes, support more efficient care, and enable real-world adoption within the NHS.

By combining clinical insight with a focus on real-world adoption, this work will help ensure quantum sensing innovations are not only technically possible, but practical and valuable in NHS care.

TSOLD for quantum biotechnology

By establishing a partnership with researchers at the University of Glasgow, the Hub will gain a significant additional capability, drawing on internationally leading expertise in time-resolved singlet oxygen luminescence detection (TSOLD) based on advanced photon counting. This is a direct method of measuring singlet oxygen concentration, a reactive oxygen species which is an essential intermediate step in biochemical reactions.

Through partnering researchers from Glasgow and Heriot-Watt, this work package will explore the singlet oxygen generation capability of new organic photosensitizers in different solutions, microenvironments and biological media.

This will result in a new library of singlet oxygen lifetimes for clinical and novel metal-free photosensitizers and pave the way for combining TSOLD with other quantum sensing modalities (such as NV diamond nanoparticles) and for construction of advanced singlet oxygen dosimetry instrumentation for laser medicine, water treatment and chemical synthesis.

OPMs optimised for sleep neurophysiology

Our researchers at UCL have shown that we can interpret the contents of sleep with high precision using contrastive learning on EEG data. To enable sleep decoding the group has also built a real-time sleep-decoding system that tracks discrete sleep stages (e.g. NREM vs REM). This has shown good real-time categorisation of sleep stages that outperforms existing automated approaches, while also showing high concordance with expert derived sleep stage labelling.

Through a new partnership with researchers at the University of Sussex, this project will aim to establish a practical, minimal-hardware pathway to quantum-enabled sleep neurophysiology using an optically pumped magnetometer (OPM) platform developed by the team at Sussex.

The initial proof-of-concept study will use a small number of OPMs (1 to 3) to detect and characterise sleep neurophysiology signals. This study will also generate evidence on whether higher bandwidth and application-specific sensor optimisation can reveal additional biomarkers, thereby broadening the scope towards follow-on studies in clinical contexts, including neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

OPMs for 7T MRI

Clinical research into brain disorders is increasingly limited by the spatial resolution achievable with in vivo imaging. Ultra-high-field MRI at 7 Tesla (7T) enables visualisation of sub-millimetre structures in patients and already delivers key clinical insights in conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis. Preclinical studies have indicated that even modest increases in resolution could enable cortical columnar imaging, opening new avenues for understanding disease mechanisms and progression.

The recent installation of a 7T Terra.X MRI in Cambridge creates a significant opportunity for mesoscopic (<0.5 mm) human brain imaging. However, achieving this potential in practice is challenging as the strong and rapidly varying magnetic field gradients required for ultra-high-resolution imaging introduce distortions that limit image quality.

 Researchers in Copenhagen have demonstrated proof-of-concept using OPM quantum field probes to provide a continuous actual gradient readout through scans, now commercialised through Magnolia Quantum Sensing.

Through a new academic partnership with researchers at the University of Cambridge, we will establish OPM-based field-probe scanning. We will do this using a fully open-source approach with Pulseq sequences and BART image reconstruction so these advances can benefit participants in all UK ultra-high field MRIs.

Ultimately, this will help to lower the barrier for entry for best-in class neuroimaging sequences and lay a foundation for the forthcoming National 11.7T MRI.

Spin-enhanced multiplexed diagnostics

Many diseases present with overlapping symptoms, while effective treatments are often target-specific and highly time-sensitive. Multiplexed diagnostic tests, which enable the simultaneous detection of multiple biomarkers from a single sample, have the potential to significantly reduce staff time, shorten time-to-diagnosis, and minimise the need for repeated patient sampling.

Our researchers have already demonstrated that using optically addressable spins in nanoparticles (such as NV centres in diamond) in lateral flow tests can achieve a 103-105-fold improvement in detection limits compared to gold nanoparticles. Extending this approach to multiplexed diagnostics would add significant capability and could be achieved using multiple spin species with distinct microwave resonances. However, this is challenging with nanodiamonds where only a single spin species (NV centres) is readily usable.

Through initiating a new academic partnership with researchers at the University of Glasgow, this project aims to address this limitation by developing optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR)-based multiplexing using molecular nanoparticles. These systems can readily support distinct microwave responses through their intrinsic chemical tunability, enabling multiplexed detection.

By combining the sensitivity of spin-enhanced biosensing with the versatility of molecular spin systems, we hope to open up highly sensitive, multiplexed tests with broad applicability across biomarkers which can be readily integrated into existing platforms, including solution-based assays.

Quantum reporters for organoid morphology

Current approaches for imaging organoids rely heavily on fluorescence microscopy combined with tissue clearing or serial sectioning which are invasive, labour intensive, and often incompatible with longitudinal studies. These challenges prevent the field from addressing important questions such as how tissue morphology, cell identity, and gene expression patterns evolve over time in complex biological settings.

Current quantum sensing technologies (such as NV diamonds) have poor expression in biological systems, which limits their deployment in in vivo and in vitro biomedical applications. Therefore, this project initiates a new partnership with Professor Harrison Steel at the University of Oxford to explore the use of magnetically actuated reporter proteins for quantum sensing of cellular processes in organoids. By translating these reporters to mammalian/organoid applications we hope to lay the groundwork for future quantum-enabled imaging modalities that combine 3D radio and magnetic-field control for accurate positioning in larger tissues, and potentially whole-organisms.

These sensors will provide a new toolkit for probing cellular processes in real time within living systems such as reactive oxygen species, temperature, mechanical strain, magnetic fields, and other spin-dependent phenomena – parameters that are central to many biological processes. 

Accelerating quantum sensing for biomedicine

Together, these six work packages reflect Q-BIOMED’s strategic approach to accelerating quantum technologies for healthcare: anchoring technical innovation in clearly defined clinical needs, building new multidisciplinary partnerships, and lowering barriers to translation and adoption.

By strengthening capabilities across imaging, diagnostics, sensing, and biological reporting, and by tightly coupling quantum innovation with clinical and user-led priorities, this funding will help position Q-BIOMED to deliver meaningful health impact while supporting the UK’s leadership in quantum biomedical technologies.