Public Funding for Lugos Technology Ltd

The impact of wounds is significant: costing the NHS ~£5,600,000,000 p.a. and responsible for ~37,000 deaths, with infections leading to permanent disability and decreased quality of life. The conflated cost of wound treatment ranges from £5,000-£11,200 per patient/year. Lugos are developing a system to instantly & accurately diagnose infections and identify specific pathogens in open wounds using optical, light-based technologies. Following pathogen identification, the system will deliver treatment to eradicate pathogens in the wound and instantly confirm that the treatment has proved effective. The system incorporates an easy-to-use mobile phone app & low-cost device for evaluation of open-wounds by the patient/carer at home, to enable continuous daily self-monitoring of the healing of open wounds throughout treatment & instantly highlighting when clinical intervention is required, well before any infection becomes chronic. The impact of successful implementation will remove diagnostic variability, improved patient outcomes & lead to reduced antibiotic reliance. The system will take up to two years to develop & undergo testing & clinical trials. Initial discussions with potential investors and customers has raised significant interest in the unique approach; however, in order to attract private investor funding at this early stage we have recognised that a demonstrator of the system and the holistic approach would support our communication activities. The key objective of _**Juno**_ is to develop a demonstrator & basic, working infrastructure to be able to gain buy-in/support from potential investors/users & to provide valuable feedback to full system development. Juno will employ existing technologies to simulate how the fully developed system would be used in operation The _**Juno**_ project will focus on developing a fully functional demonstrator, using the funding to develop an operational system using printed images of wounds instead of in-vitro samples (some images containing hidden printed signatures to simulate infection & some images demonstrating a progressive series of healing wounds). We will develop a demonstrator mobile app, and remote online-database,utilising the phone's camera to capture images in real-time and referring to the database to instantly identify differences between infected,non-infected and progressively healing wounds. Illustrating how the fully developed system would operate in use. We will use this demonstrator system to prepare literature, images & video demonstrations to show how simply the fully developed system will work & use this demonstrator in-person to gain buy-in from investors & feedback from potential customers/users.