Public Funding for Niqs Tech (Leeds) Limited

There is a compelling need for affordable and accessible technologies that can aid in the early diagnosis of medical conditions to prevent ill-health by reducing the existing and future burden of disease, ensuring everyone can live long, healthy lives. These types of solutions are equally important for monitoring long-term health conditions that can be complex and require close management to ensure no negative impact on an individual's health, as well as reducing the impact on healthcare providers' resources; a current issue for increasingly prevalent long-term conditions, such as diabetes. Currently, there are 463M people living with diabetes worldwide and a predicted 700M by 2045\. To manage their condition, people living with diabetes must maintain close glycemic control with frequent glucose measurements. However, current state-of-the-art solutions -- finger prick tests and continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) -- do not support this. Both solutions have their limitations, such as painful measurements that are intrusive to daily life, lack of reusability, inadequate measurement accuracy at low glucose concentrations, skin-irritation, user-wear fatigue, and high-cost barriers. Ultimately, these solutions deter people from making regular glucose measurements, which is the core to good diabetes management. Accessible and user-friendly solutions that encourage frequent measurements are needed to support better management practices, which will reduce the likelihood of complications and reduce the impact of diabetes on individuals and healthcare providers, such as the NHS. The NHS spends £10B (c.10% of the annual budget) tackling the treatment and complications of diabetes. Of this, c.£3B is spent on treating diabetes-related complications and correcting the issues arising from diabetes mismanagement but less than £2.5B is spent on diabetes management. This demonstrates that current state-of-the-art technologies are not conducive to effective diabetes management and that our current reactive approach is flawed. NIQS is developing the future of glucose monitoring; a truly non-invasive, continuous, and accurate glucose sensor. Our solution will provide an affordable, user-friendly alternative which will enable us to adopt a preventative and proactive approach to diabetes management compared to the current state-of-the-art. Our recent efforts culminated in a handheld-sized prototype which demonstrated high measurement accuracy across a broad range of glucose concentrations in an ex-vivo study. This grant will support NIQS' shift into in-vivo (human) studies, our wider commercialisation efforts and accelerate NIQS to market.

The objective of the project is to conduct in-vitro feasibility studies for a second- generation quantum sensor, codenamed LUX1, that optically monitors glucose in a revolutionary new way. Unlike currently available sensors, LUX1 will allow people living with diabetes (PLWD) to conveniently measure real-time glucose levels without drawing blood or breaking the skin surface, simply by bringing their finger or wrist into contact with the device. The vision for LUX1 is initially a point- of-care device and we aim to miniaturise it into a smartwatch-like wearable, e.g., Apple watch, aligning with current trends of measuring multiple vitals all in one device. Our innovative approach will be instrumental in tackling a significant worldwide problem. Currently, there are around 463M diabetes sufferers worldwide and this is predicted to rise to 700M over the next 25 years, with millions of additional undiagnosed cases. Diabetes significantly reduces life expectancy -- Type I on average by more than 20 years, and up to 10 years for Type II. In the UK, there are around 500 premature deaths every week and the NHS spend 10% of the annual budget contributing to the treatment of diabetes and the complications, equating to an expenditure of £10B per year (or £192M per week). Despite the growing severity of the situation, many people are still using invasive, non- reusable and non-cost-effective methods to monitor glucose. This demonstrates a compelling need for next-generation glucose monitors, like LUX1, to help PLWD/healthcare professionals to be more proactive in diabetes management to reduce the number of amputations/premature deaths, and associated costs. To develop our LUX1 prototype, we have split the project into four work packages: * Business development * Sensor design/manufacture * Sensor packaging/testing * In-vitro feasibility studies