Case Study

Proxximos is developing an innovative solution to prevent Healthcare Acquired Infections (HCAIs) from spreading around hospitals. The solution is based on the concept of digital contact tracing. The aim is to find people infected with a pathogen before they become infectious and spread it to a new host. Without a new host, a pathogen cannot prosper. Proxximos’ solution exploits wearable technology and is fast, accurate and capable of tackling any communicable pathogen found in a hospital.

The objective of the BMC project is to investigate the solution in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT). The project will enable Proxximos to develop and certify the solution, with the end goal of marketing it to healthcare customers in the UK and internationally.

The benefits of such a solution for the NHS could be enormous. 20% of NHS beds are occupied by patients who are overstaying due to HCAIs, and the annual direct treatment costs for these people is £2.8 billion. HCAIs cause 22,000 patient deaths per year (not including Covid-19). If the project is successful, the resulting product could increase NHS capacity by 5-10% whilst saving more than £1 billion in direct treatment costs.

Proxximos CEO, Mr Peter Whawell (MSc, MBA, OBE), said of the success “We are delighted with this success. The Innovate UK grant enables us to pursue a project otherwise out-of-reach, and is an important step for us as we pursue our vision of a world largely free from communicable disease. I am especially grateful to RedKnight for their excellent support which helped us to communicate our case”

Through SETsquared’s Scale-Up Programme, RedKnight, has supported Efuels Technologies Ltd with its successful application to Innovate UK’s Fast Start competition, helping the innovative start-up to secure £50k.

SETsquared’s Scale-Up Programme supports businesses to raise public funding and private equity. RedKnight is one of several approved grant-writing consultancies on the programme and provided Efuels with grant-writing services to secure this bid.

Efuels Technologies is developing a novel power-to-methane technology to store renewable energy within the existing natural gas infrastructure. If the technology is successfully upscaled, energy generators could use curtailed electricity to convert biogenic CO₂ into synthetic natural gas. The Fast Start innovation funding will allow the company, in collaboration with the University of Surrey, to build evidence of market validation and a bench-scale prototype of the technology.

Dr Jose Batista, Founder of Efuels Technology Ltd said, “The connection of the electricity, and gas network will play a pivotal role in the UK’s transition to net zero. The UK is nowadays writing a new chapter of the grapple against climate change. Today, wind farms provide more than 21% of the total power generated. This is fantastic but the intermittency in wind power generation has led to a big problem. Negative electricity prices are already reported during windy days when supply surpasses demand.  As soon as the grid exceeds capacity, wind farms must switch off to avoid collateral damage to the network. However, they are compensated via a constraint payment, which is passed onto consumers’ energy bills. It is known consumers have paid over £650m worth of constraint payments to wind farms. The government now wants 50 gigawatts (GW) of the UK's electricity from offshore wind by the end of the decade. If this problem remains unsolved, consumers will face larger costs in the energy bill”.

Efuels Technologies proposes a simple but challenging solution. It aims to leverage the 7,660 km of existing gas pipelines across the UK to store and transport energy surpluses from wind farms. It achieves this by converting excess renewable power into methane, which can be injected into the gas network with no regulatory barriers. The technology could create a unique bi-directional link between the electricity and gas industry to unlock more flexibility and reliability of supply into the energy market.

The thermal patterns so picked up by PODIUM will be transmitted to a cloud portal helping patients, family and medical staff to detect and immediately treat conditions before the onset of ulceration. In this way, stress and inflammation can be reduced, tissue damage limited and the foot will return to normal. Critically, up to 80% of DFUs may be avoided.

MISCA aims to lever semiconductor material integration to deliver disruptive, scalable component platforms, addressing demands of next generation telecommunications and datacommunications optical infrastructure. Project partners will use intelligent monolithic integration of compound semiconductor materials platforms to deliver high-speed detector solutions with co-optimised RF and optical performance.

Through expanding the range of ADMET properties that can be modelled and improving their reliability by applying modern 'deep learning' methods, Optibrium can improve the accuracy and applicability of these models.

Proof-of-concept work indicates their methods provide a unique advantage over 'off-the-shelf' deep learning methods when applied to sparse, uncertain data of the type found in drug discovery.

The project has contributed to parallel implementation processes in specified units across the 3 participating countries and included research to better understand the benefits of structured debriefing and organisational culture.

Finally, using the data generated from the research study, the tool has been implemented across all participating partners and its impact is going to be assessed.

Once developed the BreathSpec device will help reduce the development of anti-bacterial resistance and alleviate the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) through improved diagnosis of antibiotic treatment.

The device will also reduce the scientific, clinical and financial challenges associated with the development of new antibiotics.

The developed assay uses glyconanoparticle technology with potential for replacing molecular technologies and immunodiagnostics – a major shift in analytical approach.

The use of carbohydrates instead of antibodies as the recognition mechanism has several advantages including their production using industrial scale, cost-effective chemoenzymatic synthesis which addressed the call topic.