ORC startup debuts innovation at CES 2019

Highfield Diagnostics, a startup from the University's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC), will join tech entrepreneurs from the University of Southampton to reveal a number of ground-breaking research innovations at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas from 8-11 January.

Once again, the University’s Future Worlds Accelerator will be the only UK university exhibitor at CES – the world’s largest consumer electronics show with an audience of more than 180,000 visitors and 4,400 exhibitors - for a fourth consecutive year

Highfield Diagnostics will promote a new technology that is set to revolutionise the concept of ‘instant’ medical diagnostics.

Researchers from the ORC have developed the world’s first disposable test that can simultaneously perform separate diagnoses, enabling the testing of diseases or conditions such as tuberculosis, sexually transmitted infections or leishmania, a parasitic disease similar to malaria, from a single sample.

These novel, cost-effective and user-friendly tests are made possible by a laser-based approach that controls the flow of liquid samples via multiple flow channels within the paper strip inside a typical diagnostic test.

“This simple and rapid testing represents a real breakthrough in universal healthcare monitoring and diagnosis in the home, the doctor’s surgery or even off-grid rural settings in developing countries,” co-founder Professor Robert Eason explains. “The rapid diagnostics market is truly global. If we just considered the example of tuberculosis, there are 10 million people who are currently displaying active symptoms in India and a further two billion people worldwide who currently harbour the disease in its latent form.”

Highfield Diagnostics can produce tests that show an increase of sensitivity of a factor of one hundred compared to current conventional tests, so patients can know much earlier if they are suffering from a particular condition.

The team are also capable of producing tests that give quantitative results such as the low, medium or high presence of a specified disease, which represents a step change to current pregnancy tests for example, that are only able to give a yes or no result.

The Future Worlds stand at CES 2019 will also include live demonstrations for startups founded by students from the University of Southampton, including the BOON gift discovery platform and the Intro contact sharing app.

Follow us at CES

The University’s technologies will be unveiled in Booths 51560 and 51562 of Eureka Park in the Sands Expo, from Tuesday 8th January to Friday 11th January.

You can follow all the action from the Future Worlds Accelerator stand in a daily blog and via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can also join the Southampton team for Facebook Live sessions at 6.00pm (GMT) each day of the show.

Got a question for the Future Worlds team? Tweet #FutureWorldsCES2019 or email us to have your request answered live from Las Vegas each day.