Facilities

The students have access to top of the range equipment. We aim to create a pipeline from imaging chemistry, image acquisition through processing/reconstruction, computational modelling and clinical translation. King's has supported this pipeline with over £40m of funding for research facilities established or refurbished since the end of 2007. The CDT is based at St Thomas’ Hospital allowing us to maximise synergies between research and clinical translation. Staff are allocated space in order to enhance multi-disciplinary working and, as such, one office/lab may house a physical scientist, an engineer and a clinician working on the same disease area.

The Research facilities are as follows:

• 3000 sqm of offices, computer laboratories, and seminar rooms
• 800sqm of state-of-the-art engineering, physics, chemistry and biology laboratories including confocal microscopy, flow cytometry, and HPLC
• Pre-clinical PET-CT, SPECT-CT, PET-MR, and ultrasound and a 9.4T NMR for spectroscopy and imaging with an additional hyperpolariser
• A Biological Services Unit that has recently undergone extensive refurbishment
• A dedicated HPC facility with 640 cores and 5 terabytes of shared memory
• A new PET Imaging clinical research facility including 2 state-of-the-art PET-CT scanners and the UK’s second PET-MRI scanner
• A second high-energy cyclotron and substantial expansion of our GMP chemistry facilities, with an additional 25 hot-cells, are also in the process of being constructed
• Divisional facilities contribute to and are further enhanced by institutional core facilities.  These include the BRC Experimental Medicine Hub (£18m investment) and Clinical Research Facilities (£35m investment) located on all three clinical campuses. The facility at St Thomas' is adjacent to one of our new research MRI systems and so enables synergistic use of the two facilities.
• 6 new research clinical MRI scanners including 4 at 3T, 2 in the process of commissioning, each with unique research capabilities. For example, to facilitate interventional research programmes two of the systems (1.5T and 3T) have an XMR configuration with digital fluoroscopy and a table-top that can move easily between the two modalities. One 3T system has an 8-channel transmit capability, unique for a system based in a clinical setting, and we have a 3T system located on the neonatal intensive care unit to facilitate the perinatal research