A Keele University professor is collaborating with colleagues from across Europe to study new technologies and treatments for repairing tendon injuries and rehabilitating patients.

Professor Nick Forsyth is part of the Europe-wide research consortium, Perspectives For Future Innovation in Tendon repair (P4 FIT), led by the University of Helsinki.

The consortium, which also involves academics from Italy, Austria and Germany, has received a total of €4.1million in funding for a four-year project investigating innovative new treatments in tendon medicine, from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Tendon injuries can be a career-ending incident for many professional athletes and can be equally debilitating for anyone regardless of their activity levels, due to their crucial role in how the body moves and operates.

It’s thought that damaged tendons make up around 30% of musculoskeletal referrals in healthcare settings, so improving treatments for injuries like this could have huge benefits for the healthcare sector, as well as in the world of sport and recreation.

The grant will be used to fund 15 early-stage researchers across the institutions, five of whom will spend time at Keele which will receive around £650,000 of the funding.

P4 FIT also involves 21 partner organisations - 10 academic and 11 non-academic institutions from across the whole Europe - which will all be exploring the use of the latest technological advances in nanomedicine, to create therapeutic and diagnostic solutions for the treatment of tendon injuries.

Professor Nick Forsyth, from Keele’s School of Pharmacy and Bioengineering, said: “Our research is committed to helping develop new, regenerative medicine, and new approaches for treating disease and disorder. We’re delighted to be joining this strong consortium and look forward to helping train future tendon research leaders.”

The research will start in January 2021. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 955685.