The Guardian. The number of young people living with debilitating and incurable bowel conditions worldwide is growing, but researchers now hope a one-of-a-kind microscope will help them understand such diseases and find new treatments.
According to the British Society of Gastroenterology, more than half a million people in the UK are living with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis the two main forms.
Now a new piece of kit could bring fresh hope to those affected by IBD.
“What this microscope technology and what the science we do in the lab can bring is really to understand the mechanism [of IBD] better,” said Dr Karina Pombo-Garcia, a group leader at the Rosalind Franklin Institute at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, Oxfordshire, where the microscope is housed.
“With IBD, and with other many diseases that we collaborate with other groups to study, there [are] some treatments, but maybe those treatments still are not maybe the best or the most targeted that we can do because we … fundamentally don’t understand the disease fully.”
With its black casing, grey hoses and a plethora of wires, the microscope is remarkably unobtrusive.
Yet this is no run-of-the-mill bit of tech: the microscope operates at 10 times the resolution of conventional light microscopy, allowing researchers to see the details down to just 20nm in size.
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