Medical devices forge ahead
Medical device technology is continuing to forge ahead, with at least one major drug company expressing interest in developing its own products.
Dr Coulton Legge, head of novel analytical technologies at GlaxoSmithLine, told delegates at “Commercialising Research for Healthcare Biotechnology”, organised by the Institute of Physics, that devices can take up to 15 years to reach commercialisation.
He specifically mentioned: molecularly imprinted polymers used to generate novel materials for chromatography and biosensors, which he described as “still immature for us to take on”; “Lab on a chip” (revealed in Eureka in September 1996), which GSK is still working on; a method of using robotics to perform thousands of experiments at once; and two new developments in mass spectrometry.
Professor Chris Lowe said that his smart hologram technology, which featured in the June 2006 issue of Eureka, could now be used to develop a machine to recognise any specified disease organism in “2 to 5 minutes” provided his team could attract sufficient funding.
He is also involved in a “big programme” to detect one particular biohazard that is close to implementation.
More information on these and other medical developments will be covered in Eureka’s Technical Report on Medical Design in the December 2006 edition.
