Advanced microscope offers hope for understanding incurable bowel diseases

More than half a million people in the UK wake up each day managing inflammatory bowel disease—Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis—conditions that arrive most often between ages 15 and 40, precisely when education, careers, and relationships demand their full attention. The diseases remain incurable. But at the Rosalind Franklin Institute in Oxfordshire, researchers have begun using a microscope unlike any other in Britain, one that might finally reveal why these illnesses take hold and how to stop them.

The microscope, nicknamed Curie, operates at ten times the resolution of conventional light microscopy. Where standard equipment sees blur, Curie sees detail down to 20 nanometers—structures so small they exist at the edge of what human science could previously observe. The machine achieves this through a technique called stimulated emission depletion microscopy, or STED, a method so elegant it won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2014. The process works by labeling cellular features with fluorescent tags that absorb energy from a first laser and emit light in response. A second laser, shaped like a doughnut, overlaps that illuminated area and switches off fluorescence everywhere except the center of the ring—a pinpoint region. This allows researchers to distinguish structures packed far closer together than any conventional microscope could separate.

But Curie is not simply a more powerful version of existing tools. The microscope includes deformable mirrors that correct for optical distortions caused by the tissue samples themselves, allowing researchers to see clearly deep within thick tissues and miniature organs. It has a temperature-controlled stage that lets living cells and tissue models be studied at conditions close to normal body temperature. These additions make it singular in the UK—a machine built for precision work on the most delicate biological questions.

Dr. Karina Pombo-Garcia, a group leader at the institute, frames the stakes plainly. Treatments for inflammatory bowel disease exist, but they are not necessarily the best or most targeted available. The reason is fundamental: researchers do not yet fully understand the disease itself. What Curie and the science conducted around it can provide is that understanding—the mechanism by which IBD takes root and progresses. Dimitrios Ioannidis, a PhD student, is using the microscope to study how cells lining the intestines and other internal organs bind together to form protective barriers. He is examining specific protein complexes that he suspects change over time, from fetal development through adulthood. By seeing these structures with unprecedented clarity, he can compare what healthy tissue looks like against what appears in people with disease. If the structure of these protein complexes changes, their function changes too. Understanding that difference—what has gone wrong—opens the possibility of finding the root cause itself.

The microscope was unveiled by science minister Chris McDonald alongside an announcement of £67 million in funding for the Rosalind Franklin Institute over the next five years, beginning in April 2027, plus a further £90 million for the Henry Royce Institute, which focuses on materials research. Both grants come from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through the core budget of UK Research and Innovation, allocated in the 2025 spending review. The timing, however, arrives amid strain across British science facilities. Earlier this year, the Science and Technology Facilities Council revealed it must find £162 million in savings by 2030, driven by rising energy costs, staffing expenses, expanded activities, and unfavorable currency movements. Three major facilities on the same campus as the Rosalind Franklin Institute—the Diamond Light Source, Central Laser Facility, and ISIS Neutron and Muon Source—face a combined 15 percent funding reduction, raising concerns within the scientific community about closures. McDonald defended the funding landscape, arguing that characterizing the situation as cuts misrepresents the high-level budget reality, though he acknowledged that the Science and Technology Facilities Council must live within its means and prioritize spending. The question now is whether Curie and the discoveries it enables will justify the investment in an era when British science facilities are being asked to do more with less.