Other things? The UK doesn’t have very effective commercial microfabrica-
tion capabilities, always have German, Norwegian and Swiss partners from
large scale research organisations and also Irish women who work in Spain
– they are so good at their job and amazingly efficient, work closely with
your Project Officer at the EC – they really want you to succeed, get the
message out – take the project to major Trade Fairs as if you are a company
and showcase the excellent work you’re doing in order to create exploita-
tion opportunities.
S100:
Your current activities include sensors for liver disease, infectious diseases,
the metabolome, as well as new kind of acoustic sensor. Where do the ideas come
from?
CMN:
Those projects have all arisen from talking to people about needs
and what we can do to meet them.The best interdisciplinary diagnostic
technology projects are driven by the needs of the user community, not by
the technology, no matter how novel.All too often I’ve seen projects which
describe technologies looking for, or being shoe-horned into, an area for
which there is no real clinical need – home tests for myocardial infarction,
that was a classic! If your having chest pains, phone an ambulance! There are
many, many more examples in which it’s obvious the scientists and engineers
just didn’t get out and find out what people wanted and needed to do but
couldn’t. I’m enormously fortunate to be embedded in a clinical environment
– at one end of my corridor there is the main hospital clinical diagnostic
laboratory, while at the other there is the regional Public Health England
Laboratory.
...Continued
Professor Calum McNeil
11
Sensor100 November News 2013
