Peter Gabriel, the singer and musician, is planning a medical streaming service to beam groundbreaking therapies directly into people’s homes, after his wife was cured of cancer using stem cell therapy.

Gabriel’s wife Meabh, 47, a costume designer, developed aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma 18 months ago, which left her with agonising tumours, the largest of which was the size of a melon.

After intensive chemotherapy failed, the family scoured the internet for the latest treatments and came across Dr William and Vincent Li, of The Angiogenesis Foundation, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

They suggested genetically engineering Meabh’s immune cells to fight the cancer – a therapy known as CAR T-Cell, which completely cleared the disease in just a single infusion.

Speaking about his wife’s illness for the first time at the Unite to Cure Fourth Vatican International Conference in Vatican City, Gabriel said it had inspired him to create an ITunes-style health platform with the Li’s.

Called ‘The Tap’, it would bring together all the latest technology from thousands of different companies to monitor health or treat conditions such as stroke, cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney stones or wounds at home.

Gabriel said: “My wife got sick about 18 months ago, with a very aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and we were very lucky because we knew Vince and Will Li and they led us through the maze that is cancer and eventually CAR-T and now she is remarkably well.

“We are enormously grateful for all the science and research that went into that, but it is being marketed at around £1 million dollars a head and we spent a lot of time in the hospitals thinking, ‘well is there anything we can do to make a difference there?'.  

“My dad was an inventor so one of the things that got us interested when music turned into digits was to try and get a platform that would allow anyone to get any music and we created a thing called OD2 in 1999, four years before ITunes which became Nokia Music.

“The idea is to create a similar platform that would allow new types of medicine to be streamed to the home so that the home becomes the treatment centre. Streamed medicine is about to hit, so lets accelerate it and make sure the experts start talking to each other so it’s all in one place.”

Dr Vincent Li said the concept was ‘Iron Man meets ‘Black Panther.’ The team has designed the prototype for a lattice of hexaganol cells which could mould around any body part with embedded sensors and electrodes through which treatments could be beamed.

He said: “Imagine a world in which a person could be alerted at the earliest stage that you were having little tiny strokelets, developing in your brain before you get vascular dementia so you could better control your blood pressure on a daily basis.

“Or a world in which you could start to see the first signs of microscopic cancer cells forming in your body the way you would had you had the benefit of getting a regular MRI scan when nobody regularly gets.

“Imagine a person who is having some abdominal discomfort and instead of rushing to the emergency room perhaps they could find out if they had a kidney stone or a galls stone and do something about in terms of early treatment before it becomes and emergency.”

Using the device, users could even download tumour-busting electrical fields which have been proven to prevent the abnormal cell division behind cancer, or low frequency ultrasound to boost wound healing.

“These types of technology are either emerging or already available,” added Dr Li. At the conference Gabriel urged the scientists and doctors attending to come together to allow their work to form part of the platform.

Breaking into tears he said: “You’re doing amazing work here. In the same way that your work saved the woman I love, a lot of what you do will save a lot more people if you can get it to talk together.”

Writing on the conference blog Meabh Gabriel also urged patients to take advantage of new technologies and never give up hope. “In those moments, you really need to trust your instincts,” she said.

“I knew there were scientists out there doing the most extraordinary work and I was not put off by the fact it was a clinical trial.

“Stay focused, get the best advice and believe in yourself. Don’t let someone say there’s very little we can do for you and think that that’s the end. Because it doesn’t have to be.”