Find out more about our ambitious upgrade project, delivering more brightness, more coherence, and greater speed of analysis to UK science. More about Diamond-II
Find out more about Diamond's response to virus research.
Find out more about what we achieved in 2013.
Better Treatments for Disease
But it’s not just human health that Diamond is helping to improve. Foot-and-mouth disease (FMDV) is a plague of livestock that is endemic throughout much of the world, costs $5 billion a year, and causes much suffering in poor countries. But in 2013, scientists collaborating across various UK institutions used Diamond to develop a new methodology for producing a vaccine which is safer, less fragile and easier to transport. There’s still a long way to go before the vaccine reaches the market, but the signs from early clinical trials are very promising. And the methodology may well transfer to other, similar viruses that affect humans, such as polio, meaning that it could provide a potent new tool in global disease control.
Diamond Light Source is the UK's national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.
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