| Project Detail |
Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals resulting in ~700k deaths in Europe each year. Patients urgently require critical care and are admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU), where they are treated with antibiotics. However, antibiotic dosing is inappropriate in ~50% of sepsis patients, causing poor clinical outcomes due to increased adverse events, (neuro)toxicity and contributing to antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic dosing can be significantly improved through therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM), but current workflows for drug quantification in clinics and ICU are slow, expensive, and inflexible, which have greatly limited TDM implementation. We develop ACU-SERS: a first-in-class, highly flexible, fast, and cost-effective system that fully automates the biological sample pre-treatment, analyte separation and analysis and provides a quantitative antibiotic drug level concentration in ~15 minutes. ACU-SERS breakthrough technology combines centrifugal microfluidics with an integrated surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) chip to perform label-free, rapid detection and quantification in an easy-to-use benchtop device. Based on the H2020 SERSing project, this project builds on developing the Raman-based analyser device and the optimal cartridge, as well as validating the scalability of the product and the system with clinical samples. From the commercial side, we will validate the commercial potential of our solution, found a spin-off company to commercialize the technology, and make it investment-ready. We envision that the spin-off will generate early revenues from direct sales in our initial target markets within the EU. After demonstrating market traction, we will seek to close a global distribution deal with a large diagnostics company for the TDM antibiotic market. Revenues will be reinvested to adapt ACU-SERS for TDM applications in other potential markets, such as antiepileptics, immunosuppressants and applications in pharmaceutical research. |
