Congratulations to the following recipients who have successfully secured grants.
The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Endeavour Fund has awarded $12million dollars to Professor Simon Malpas and his team.
The team has Professor Simon Malpas, Dr David Budgett, Dr Daniel McCormick and Dr Jenny Kruger.They are all based at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute.
Title: Smart sensors for the medical industry
The abstract below is the abstract from the grant:
Pressure inside our bodies is a fundamental physiological parameter that gives us insight into the status of diseases such as heart failure, hypertension, urinary function, and recovery from trauma.
So why is it only measured occasionally and for a short period of time? Pressures inside the body are hard to access and the accuracy of the sensors degrade over time. If accurate pressure measurements could be obtained chronically and trends observed, then home monitoring of disease states and timely intervention would be enabled.
We will capture this opportunity, to transform the way we treat pressure-related conditions, allowing preemptive clinical management and keeping people at home and out of hospital. Our plan is to create the industry to obtain, manage and respond to clinically relevant pressure measurements from the human body.
The science problem is the insufficient accuracy of implantable pressure sensors. All chronic use sensors drift over time because of mechanical changes to the sensor, the housing (encapsulation) and fouling (blood or tissue). We have developed the concept for novel solution to enable sensors to be recalibrated, which provides a dramatic improvement in their long-term accuracy. Our 20 years of experience in medical pressure sensing and operating companies based on pressure sensing, have provided the basis for this technology.
We will use this solution to create a platform that enables monitoring of pressure in combination with our wireless power technology to power devices and cloud computing to transmit data. We will target two specific clinical conditions to showcase the technology – hydrocephalus and urinary incontinence – where we have strong clinical pull for solutions. We have implementation partner companies with manufacturing, data analytics and patient management systems expertise.
A+ Trust & FMHS/Auckland Academic Health Alliance Collaborative Research Grant
Annette Lasham, Molecular Medicine & Pathology
Monitoring of plasma RNA levels during chemotherapy treatment for metastatic breast cancer- a feasibility study of blood-based indicators of treatment response for New Zealand women with breast cancer
$60,000
Beau Pontre, Anatomy and Medical Imaging
Developing a non-invasive treatment alternative for Atrial Fibrillation: Cardiac Radiotherapy with real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging target-tracking
$42,500
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment/MBIE Smart Ideas
Moana Tercel, Auckland Cancer Research
New payloads for antibody-drug conjugates
$1,000,000
School of Medicine Foundation/School of Medicine Foundation Project
Peter Thorne, Physiology
Freemasons Histology Research Technician
$30000