“With IBD, and with other many diseases that we collaborate with other groups to study, there [are] some treatments, but maybe those treatments still are not maybe the best or the most targeted that we can do because we … fundamentally don’t understand the disease fully.”

With its black casing, grey hoses and a plethora of wires, the microscope is remarkably unobtrusive.

Yet this is no run-of-the-mill bit of tech: the microscope operates at 10 times the resolution of conventional light microscopy, allowing researchers to see the details down to just 20nm in size.