Needle that could transform cancer diagnostics wins top award
Award winner Dr Alex Dudgeon (right) with Master Needlemaker Nick Macrae (centre) and Court Assistant Kimball Bailey (left) at Haberdashers’ Hall
A new medical needle with the potential to transform how diseases are diagnosed has won a prestigious award from the Worshipful Company of Needlemakers.
The Needlemakers’ Award for Advanced Needle Technology, now in its second year, supports an early-stage medical or bioscience project involving the innovative use of needles or their replacements for the benefit of patients and wider society.
The 2026 award winner is DEEPeR-Needle (Development and Evaluation of Extended Probe-based Raman Needle), an initiative led by Dr Alex Dudgeon from the University of Exeter.
DEEPeR-Needle uses fibre-optic, light-based (Raman) needles to detect the unique fingerprint of diseases, including cancers, reducing the need for invasive surgical biopsies and offering real-time diagnostic information.
The award will support the work to develop this early-stage innovation in cancer diagnosis as the team aims to optimise and refine their needle designs so they can be used across multiple organs.
The Needlemakers – in conjunction with the Worshipful Company of Entrepreneurs via their successful EASI Programme – will support DEEPeR-Needle through mentoring and a series of workshops, as well as funding to help take the project to its next stage.
Applications for the ANT Award were received from teams from within the NHS, university departments of medicine and engineering and from medical research startups across the UK, with a wide range of innovative projects that demonstrate the extended use of a variety of needle types, or their replacements, to make a medical or scientific process or intervention more efficient and pain-free.
A shortlist of four finalists was interviewed by a panel of distinguished experts with clinical, academic and commercial backgrounds, including Professor Thomas Waite (the Deputy Chief Medical Officer of England), Professor Teresa Lambe (Calleva Head of Vaccine Immunology and Professor of Vaccinology & Immunology at the University of Oxford), Dr Mark Slack (Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of CMR Surgical) and Liverymen Ian Quirk (Founder of Active Needle Technology) and Helen Tomkys (Head of Global Health Security Preparedness at the Department of Health and Social Care).
Congratulating the winner, Nick Macrae, Master of the Needlemakers, said: “In choosing DEEPeR-Needle, the judging panel were impressed with the urgent need they address for a new diagnostic solution which can benefit a large number of patients. We are delighted to support them as they embark on this next strategic commercialisation phase.”
Dr Alex Dudgeon, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, said: “We are delighted and proud to have received this award in order to accelerate the development of our medical device, which has already been tested on lymphoma patients, and make it applicable to a wider range of diseases, deep within the body. We would like to thank the Worshipful Company of Needlemakers for awarding us with the Advanced Needle Technology Award and are very much looking forward to working with them to innovate and improve patients’ diagnostic care. We are confident that the invaluable support and mentorship of both the Needlemakers and the Entrepreneurs will help us to achieve our goal of ensuring our novel, light-based innovation can benefit as many patients as possible.”
