Zoltan Takats is Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Imperial College London and is a renowned analytical chemist. He has developed a family of analytical technologies that are capable of the direct chemical interrogation of samples in their ambient environment, opening the way to the development of in-vivo clinical applications. These efforts led to the development of the an intelligent surgical device (also known as iKnife), a bi-functional tool which performs surgical dissection and the chemical analysis of the dissected tissue, leading to real-time tissue identification capability. The technology was recently used for fundamental cancer metabolism research and a new breast cancer phenotype driven by PIK3CA mutation was discovered.