Owlstone Medical takes prestigious engineering award
6 Aug 2018 by Evoluted New Media
The team behind a Breath Biopsy platform has been named the winner of the MacRobert Award 2018 by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Owlstone Medical say that their ReCIVA Breath Sampler has opened up the potential for earlier diagnosis and precision medicine across cancer, inflammatory disease and infectious disease. It also, they say, has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of lives and $1.5 billion in healthcare costs globally.
Dr Dame Sue Ion, Chair of the MacRobert Award judging panel, said: “Owlstone Medical has now created a device that is dependable and non-intrusive, and has the potential to revolutionise the way we diagnose and treat a vast array of diseases. The societal benefit is clear to see, and I believe they could realise their vision of saving more than a billion dollars in global healthcare costs and saving hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Owlstone Medical has created the first platform capable of capturing breath samples and analysing them in a robust and reproducible way. These samples can be used to identify the unique chemical ‘biomarkers’ of a variety of diseases, also known as volatile organic compounds (VOCs), in human breath. As VOC levels change at the very earliest stages of disease and provide information on the current activity of cells and tissue, the breath samples could lead to earlier diagnosis of diseases such as cancer when treatments are more effective and more lives can be saved.
