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2024 Rosalind Franklin Medal and Prize

Professor Nicholas Stone for pioneering use of light for diagnosis and therapy in healthcare; most significantly, for developing novel Raman spectroscopic tools and techniques for rapid in-vivo cancer diagnosis and monitoring. 


Professor Nicholas Stone is an outstanding physicist who has pioneered the use of light-based analytical tools to solve clinical problems. This has involved developing novel spectroscopic techniques for rapid, minimally invasive, molecularly specific tissue, cell and fluid sampling, leading to rapid point-of-care testing for disease. 

Stone produced the world’s first demonstrations of Raman spectroscopic pathological discrimination in the larynx, oesophagus, bladder, prostate, thyroid, parathyroid and various cancers of the lymph nodes. This technique utilises the molecular-specific spectral signatures and is able to match the performance of the gold standard histopathology; demonstrating the biochemical expression of disease, and relating that directly to the grading and staging of disease. 

Further applications of Raman spectroscopy include a study of over 500 patients showing that the molecular composition of breast microcalcifications and their heterogeneity (within ductal carcinoma in situ, identified at mammographic screening) is directly correlated with those that progress to invasive breast cancer. This indicates that Raman spectroscopy can provide a prognostic indicator for future disease progression. 

Stone has also developed medical devices, including a confocal endoscopic Raman probe for in-vivo tissue analysis to identify early malignancies in hollow organs, which is now being tested in patients during routine endoscopy. His smart Raman needle probe will be used for in-vivo subcutaneous tissue analysis, enabling in-vivo diagnosis and detection of malignancies in solid organs and accurate localization of sensitive injection sites. This device is currently undergoing Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency approvals for first in-human testing in the clinic. Furthermore, he has developed a novel approach to probe the temperature of nanoparticles buried within turbid media, opening the path to directly monitoring temperatures using backscattered light during light-mediated hyperthermia. 

Stone is also a respected scientific leader, having co-founded the International Society of Clinical Spectroscopy (CLIRSPEC) and been director of science and vice president for the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM); working closely with the Institute of Physics in the latter role, sitting on the Medical Physics Group. He is a co-investigator on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council CLIRPath-AI network, bringing together digital pathology, unstained molecular imaging and artificial intelligence/machine learning techniques to deliver solutions for complex clinical decision making. 

Stone is an exceptional scientist who uses a combination of fundamental physics and novel optical techniques to develop original diagnostic techniques that help clinicians improve outcomes for patients.