Coming soon to ITV4 is the premiere of Sanctuary - a new, ground-breaking sci-fi series.

The 13-part programme is based on the world's first high-definition web show and will be the first to use live-action actors against mostly virtual sets.

Amanda Tapping is Dr Helen Magnus, a 157-year old physician who studies monsters.

She is aided in her work by her reluctant protégé, psychiatrist Will Zimmerman (Dawson’s Creek), and her fearless daughter Ashley (Battlestar Gallactica).

Together they seek to find and help the strange and often frightening creatures that populate their world.

Dr Magnus is on a mission to finish her father’s work and unlock the secrets behind human evolution using a unique combination of science, medicine and her own knowledge of the supernatural.

After becoming entangled in a relationship with a time-travelling murderer and bearing his child, Magnus’s story fast-forwards to the present day where she and her daughter Ashley now operate an underground sanctuary and scientific laboratory that houses the monsters and creatures they capture and study.

It is here that Magnus, alongside her assistant, Will, explore the supernatural, the terrifying and the impossible in a bid to understand all life.

Sanctuary is making the leap to television from the internet, where it began as the world’s first high-definition sci-fi web series.

Within one month of Sanctuary’s online premiere on May 13, 2007, more than 500,000 people had viewed the 20-minute series pilot.