An East London cancer survivor who lost most of her tongue during treatment has been fitted with what is believed to be the first bespoke NHS artificial tongue, in a breakthrough that has transformed her ability to speak.
Dr Imogen Brooks, an assistant medical writer from Newham, was just 26 when she was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma, the most common form of head and neck cancer. Surgery to remove the tumour took the majority of her tongue.
Although surgeons initially rebuilt the area and restored some of her speech, follow-up radiotherapy caused the reconstructed tissue to shrink. Her voice deteriorated to the point where strangers struggled to understand her, and she came to rely on assistive technology to manage telephone calls. She has described the loneliness that followed: people she spoke to for the first time, she said, would stare at her in fear, while others would simply smile and pretend they had understood.
The misunderstandings followed her into medical appointments and her working life, leaving her isolated and frustrated. Convinced that more could be done, Dr Brooks began researching prosthetic tongues herself and asked her clinical team at Guy’s and St Thomas’ whether she might be a suitable candidate.
The response astonished her. At her next appointment, eight clinicians were in the room — every one of them willing to try. A multidisciplinary team was assembled under Carolyn Doughty, an advanced specialist speech and language therapist at the trust, bringing together experts in restorative dentistry and laboratory technicians.
What followed was months of research, digital scanning and prototyping. Two trial prosthetics were built and refined before the final bespoke design was agreed. The finished device is constructed around a U-shaped cobalt-chrome frame that clips onto Dr Brooks’s lower teeth, holding a fixed silicone tongue sculpted precisely to the contours of her mouth.
Michael Brown, a dental technician at Guy’s Hospital who helped build the prosthesis, said the team relished a challenge unlike any they had faced before. The shape was engineered to allow the maximum number of sounds, and each prototype was taken home, tested and returned with pages of detailed notes. Ms Doughty, who has presented the findings at conferences across the UK, believes it is the first prosthetic of its kind to have been made on the NHS.
The results came quickly. Dr Brooks noticed her speech improving within three days of receiving the device and had fully adapted to it within about two weeks. She has since passed the oral examination for her doctorate in skin disease therapies at King’s College London — and says the difference to her everyday life has been enormous.
What strikes her most is how differently people respond to her now: listeners are more willing to give her their attention, have far less difficulty understanding her, and are readier to ask her to repeat herself when something is unclear. For anyone living with a communication barrier, that willingness to listen can matter as much as the technology itself — something reflected in calm spaces designed for neurodivergent Londoners and other accessibility initiatives across the capital.
Nowhere has the change been felt more keenly than in conversations with her grandmother, who is hard of hearing. Dr Brooks once relied on sweeping hand gestures and written notes, and found group conversations especially difficult. Visiting her grandmother with the first prototype — without mentioning it in advance — she was told it was the first time her grandmother had been able to follow the conversation without all the gesturing.
The benefits go beyond communication. Speaking now takes far less physical effort: she can talk for longer without pausing for breath in the middle of a sentence, and no longer has to concentrate so hard on every word, leaving her speech more fluid and far less tiring.
What is a bespoke artificial tongue – and how does it help?
The tongue does some of the heaviest lifting in human speech. We press it against the teeth, gums and palate to shape consonants and vowels, and it plays an equally vital role in moving food around the mouth when we eat and swallow. When surgery removes most of it, that precision is lost — and with it, the ability to be easily understood.
A bespoke prosthesis aims to hand some of that back. Unlike anything bought off the shelf, it is mapped to the individual’s mouth with digital scans and then sculpted — in this case from medical-grade silicone on a metal frame — so the remaining muscles have a surface to work against. That restores the contact points needed for clearer sounds, and devices of this kind can also make eating and swallowing more manageable. Because each one is tailored to a single person’s anatomy, the fit, comfort and function go far beyond what a standard device could offer. Communication, after all, takes many forms — as deaf-led theatre in Finsbury Park proves night after night.
A London NHS breakthrough
The project is the latest example of the capital’s health service pushing into truly personalised care. London’s NHS trusts routinely combine digital scanning, rapid prototyping and traditional craftsmanship to tackle problems that once looked untreatable — and at Guy’s and St Thomas’, all three were brought together around a single patient.
It is a reminder that some of the most meaningful innovation in the health service happens not through grand programmes but in small, determined teams willing to attempt what has never been tried. London hospitals have witnessed other remarkable recoveries too — from an 11-year-old who became a hotelier after a heart transplant to countless quieter victories that never make the news.
Dr Brooks has said her earliest symptoms were so mild that she worried she was overreacting when she asked her GP to examine her tongue. The diagnosis, when it came, was a devastating shock — but there is now no sign of the disease. Her hope is that her story encourages clinicians to collaborate with patients and to fight for every possible improvement in quality of life: proof that the NHS, at its best, treats the person as well as the condition.
