Fighting cancer with technology

More than 350,000 Britons are diagnosed with cancer each year; that’s almost 1,000 people per day. You will probably have heard this statistic before — but that doesn’t make it any less shocking. In fact, the numbers are so large that some people now refer to this as a ‘cancer epidemic’.

Fortunately, technology is progressing and improving at such a fast pace that medical innovation is taking place all the time. This supplement, sponsored by Philips, aims to look at the key role that technology has to play in tackling this epidemic. For example, Jo Macfarlane looks at new machinery that enables body parts to survive outside the body. She also examines medical breakthroughs that could stop the body from rejecting organ transplants. Neil Armstrong looks at how artificial intelligence could allow us to diagnose diseases far more easily, while Victoria Lambert finds out how 3D printing is helping in the areas of research and prosthetics — and could soon create living tissue.