UBC researcher gets $3M for development of credit-card-sized biomedical sensor – BC News

Image: UBC

Sudip Shekhar

A University of British Columbia researcher is kicking progress of a credit history-card-sized, disposable “biomedical sensor” – capable of detecting not only COVID-19 and other illnesses – into higher equipment.

Sudip Shekhar, who is at present an associate professor in electrical/laptop engineering at UBC, been given recognition before this month in the type of a $3-million Schmidt Science Polymaths Award that is aimed at supporting tenured researchers about the planet in driving interdisciplinary investigate.

Shekhar, the first Canadian to receive the award, will get the funding around a 5-calendar year time period in his quest to provide his biomedical sensor machine into market. An early evidence of thought, working with the know-how that would go into an eventual miniaturized system, has currently proved effective in detecting COVID-19 in folks.

“It’s a pleasant shock,” Shekar claimed of profitable the award grant. “There’s heaps of do the job to be done, but certainly, this is a quite generous gift and a nod to really encourage [researchers] to go and do dangerous exploration.”

The unit Shekhar envisioned, he stated, would be a little something that can be quickly carried by any individual person for screening for conditions everywhere he or she goes. The devices – which take a sample of body fluids this sort of as blood, saliva or urine – would include chipsets connected to Bluetooth networks that would instantaneously transmit the knowledge gathered from the sample to on the internet investigation/diagnosis programs.

The success would then be transmitted back again to the product to relay the benefits of the examination, Shekhar claimed.

“My background in chip layout,” mentioned Shekhar, a former circuits analysis scientist at tech huge Intel. “I create chips that have now been applied in facts centres all close to the planet. What the Schmidt Award needs scientists to do is to take the cash and do research which is risky and possibly even a pivot [out of one particular discipline].

“And when COVID strike, the only get the job done you could do is COVID-associated do the job. My colleagues – engineering professor Lukas Christowski and biomedical units researcher Karen Cheung – have been working on biosensors. And the moment we begun doing the job collectively, we begun wanting at matters in a distinct standpoint in acknowledging that what would definitely effects the planet is not one more substantial, expensive gadget but a more compact, pretty affordable one – some thing that folks can use easily in their personal houses.”

By means of Dream Photonics Inc., a corporation co-founded by Christowski and Shekhar, the scientists developed the proof of thought this calendar year that detected COVID-19 in a sample. Shekhar additional he is hopeful that – within a year’s time – the group will be able to produce a credit score-card-sized prototype to display to likely business companions for an eventual sector-entry a handful of many years down the line.

The doable programs, he included, is endless. The devices can be made use of to monitor the health of men and women dwelling in remote communities, for case in point, where entry to health professionals and health care laboratories might be non-existent.

Alternatively, the products can be created available at hospitals and doctors’ places of work to be provided out to individual sufferers for a nearer, additional timely accessibility to diagnosis. While it does not substitute the need to have to see actual doctors, the units to generate solutions that might increase wellbeing results of persons who may well not be in a position to see their doctors immediately.

What is essential now, Shekhar stated, is for fascinated partners to achieve out – mainly because these research isn’t cheap even with the award grant funding.

“In Vancouver and B.C., we have a lot of individuals who have taken technological innovation out of college and commercialized it efficiently,” he said. “We’d like to chat with these persons it’s possible they would deliver experience that we do not have appropriate now. It’s possible they will tell us about purposes that we have not understood nonetheless… We’d definitely like to grow out collaborative endeavours.”