Multidisciplinary team awarded £540K grant from EPSRC

A collaboration between the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and the School of Medicine at the University of Southampton have successfully secured funding of £540K from EPSRC to develop the next generation of paper based diagnostic devices.

The team of Professor Robert Eason (ORC), Dr Collin Sones (ORC) and Professor Paul Elkington (Medicine) established links across disciplines via the NAMRIP network.

The World Health Organization have identified access to affordable, reliable, user-friendly and rapid medical diagnostic tests as of critical importance globally.

Point-of-care (POC) devices, where an answer is provided in a matter of minutes, currently exist to show if someone is pregnant or has diabetes for example. Similar tests are required for illnesses such as Tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial infection which continues to kill over 1.5 million people a year in the developing world, more than any other infectious disease. An increasing percentage of those die from multi drug-resistant TB.

Better diagnostics, as highlighted in the O’Neill report into AMR, will play a major role in overcoming the TB challenge. Professor Eason and Dr Sones will combine their expertise in paper based diagnostics with Professor Elkington’s specialised knowledge in TB to move beyond a device which simply shows a binary yes/no result (like a pregnancy test) to develop a more sophisticated device. One that can provide a semi-quantitative measurement of a number of disease-related biomarkers simultaneously. This will be via a single test using smart-gate technology with the ultimate aim of being able to detect TB and break the infectious cycle.