Biosensors provide an extremely useful, user friendly and cost effective route for rapid diagnosis. This has been seen for diabetics with the introduction of the blood glucose biosensor in the 1990's, which now has advanced to full disease management systems using smartphones. With new technological advances discovered to link affinity reagents to electronic surfaces, it is now possible to produce biosensors to any protein. Affinity reagents are biochemicals that bind proteins e.g. antibodies or virus antigens, very tightly thereby making the tests being developed absolutely specific to the target being detected. The vision for this project and the main area of focus will be to generate biosensors to coronavirus antibodies and antigens (COVID-19) to make a serological test for the virus. Associated with this main aim is a trial of a new set of electronic components to run the biosensors created. Combining these and the biosensors made will allow the production of a compact field measurement system to detect if a person has been infected and even if a person is still infected. The project protocols will demonstrate the feasibility of the biosensors to be manufactured and also to test their sensitivity and specificity to the virus proteins to be detected. To date the serological tests to detect COVID-19 have been inadequate in field use. It is aimed to overcome this with new specific reagents being incorporated into the biosensors and this will be a prime outcome of the project. In addition to detecting COVID-19, the whole system is future proofed, because it will be possible to change the specificity of the biosensors by changing the affinity reagent used. Therefore if a different virus appears, proteins and antibodies associated with any new virus can be detected by making a different biosensor with different reagents to change the specificity. In addition, the device described could be adapted to detect any protein, giving the capability of detecting any disease in the future.

Bacterial and viral infections include meningitis and septicaemia which are both serious, life-threatening illnesses. Patients who are suspected of having meningitis and/or septicaemia symptoms must be diagnosed and treated quickly, as it can become life threatening within a few hours. Accurate and fast diagnosis of these conditions can be difficult, therefore the availability of a simple electronic device able to diagnose the presence or absence of infecting bacteria in less than 20 minutes will be a significant step forward. This project is aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of producing biosensors that will be able to simultaneously detect a broad range of bacterial species using a simple sample collection routes, e.g. a fingerprick blood test. A biosensor is a compact electronic device that detects bacteria and sends an electronic signal, thus giving a measurable reading if bacteria are present. In addition a commonly used general test for infection will be included in the biosensor. If the bacterial biosensor is positive and the infection biosensor is also positive then the infection is bacterial. Conversely if the bacterial biosensor is negative but the infection biosensor is positive, the infection is almost certainly viral in origin.

ELISHA Systems Ltd designs and manufactures disposable single measurement biochips coupled with an electronic reader for use as point of care devices in the detection and quantification of target molecules within organic matrices.The company is now looking at the adaptation of this platform to a point of care device for detection of bacterial cells within chronic wounds.

Cardiovascular diseases account for more than 150,000 annual deaths in UK, affect more than 5 million people and cost more than £30bn a year to treat. To tackle this problem, drug companies and academics are trying to find new ways to expand our understanding of the causes of cardiovascular disease, and develop new ways of treating them. Usually, this research involves the use of animal models. Tests in animals are often unable to accurately predict what will happen in a human when a drug is given, leading to unexpected harmful effects in patients. The aim of our project is to develop a model of the cardiovascular system, using human cells, in a circulating system to allow the cells to communicate and detecting their response to drugs using state-of-the-art biosensor chips. This physiologically-relevant model will be a major step towards study of cardiovascular diseases and therapies in the laboratory without using animals. The models developed in this project could help drug companies identify which drugs are going to be useful and which drugs will be harmful, helping them to develop safe and effective new treatments for cardiovascular diseases, and saving human and animal lives.

MRSA is widely recognised as one of the so called 'superbugs' as it is responsible for many incidents of healthcare related infections and it is also resistant to many of the common antibiotics available. It is therefore very important to be able to rapidly detect and measure MRSA, especially when people are admitted to hospital through the accident & emergency route, so as to avoid any chance of infection. The PROMPT feasibility project funded in 2011-2012 by the TSB successfully demonstrated a new type of biosensor based system could specifically detect MRSA under field conditions. This success has led to the PROMPT-Plus project that aims to further develop the biosensor system to fully operational point-of-care prototypes that will be tested in NHS trust laboratories. The concept for the biosensor system was conceived by ELISHA Systems Ltd with support from the Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA) and will be commercialised in the future by British Biocell International Ltd (BBI)