Lateral thinking: Lateral flow test engineering and lessons learned from COVID-19
Many of our i-sense team members have received awards or fellowships over the past year - let’s take a closer look at a few of our award updates.
Public engagement is an important part of our research at i-sense, in order to disseminate our findings with a wide, diverse and inclusive audience and also to develop our network and engage future researchers into the field. Let’s take a closer look at some of the varied areas of public engagement that we have been involved in over the past few months.
Zyme Biosciences, a team led by Dr Marta Broto Aviles who is an i-sense postdoc in Prof Molly Stevens group at Imperial College London, have made the finals of WE Innovate 2021. The scheme is led by the Imperial Enterprise Lab and provides a platform to showcase the incredible progress being made in women’s entrepreneurship at Imperial – with winning teams receiving a part of a 30K prize fund for their ideas.
The quantum sensing abilities of nanodiamonds can be used to improve the sensitivity of paper-based diagnostic tests, potentially allowing for earlier detection of diseases such as HIV, according to a study led by researchers in the i-sense McKendry group at UCL.
Antibiotic resistence is a growing global concern and major threat to human health.
The standard method used to detect resistance in bacteria, known as phenotypic antibiotic sensitivity testing, monitors bacterial growth over about 12 – 24 hours and is therefore a slow process. New rapid methods for antibiotic sensitivity testing are urgently needed to improve antibiotic stewardship.
The team at i-sense have been working collaboratively across institutions to develop point-of-care diagnostic tests for COVID-19. When the UK went into lockdown in mid-March, a small group of researchers were given special access to i-sense labs in London and quickly implemented appropriate measures to ensure they could continue this important work safely.
Professor Molly Stevens’ team have been awarded £50,000 in funding from the new Imperial College COVID-19 Response Fund to develop point-of-care diagnostics for the current pandemic.
Led by Prof Molly Stevens, the i-sense team at Imperial College London have received over €500,000 in funding from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) as part of their COVID-19 Rapid Response Call.
