ArchiveNew Queen Mary spin out company wins entrepreneurship award
09 April 2008
Queen Mary, University of London’s newest spin out company, EMdot, has been awarded the 2008 Royal Academy of Engineering ERA Foundation Entrepreneurs prize.
The award has been established to identify entrepreneurial researchers working in UK universities in the field of electro-technology who are at an early stage in their career and who demonstrate both considerable entrepreneurial promise and the potential to benefit the UK's future prosperity.
This year's winning team are Dr Mark Paine, Dr Matthew Alexander and Dr Katharine Smith from the School of Engineering and Material’s Science (SEMS), who will receive the £40,000 prize fund for their patented drop-on demand dispensing technology.
The technology allows the controlled production of extremely small liquid droplets which is important in a number of biomedical applications such as the engineering of replacement cartilage, soft tissue or bone and the production of microarray chips for drug development or disease diagnosis.
The winning team commented: “We feel deeply honoured to be awarded this prize which will help us apply our technology in the burgeoning life science market and to accelerate the development of products in collaboration with industrial partners.”
The team along with Professor John Stark, Head of the School of Engineering and Materials Science, are all co-inventors of the core technology and founders of Emdot Ltd. This award recognises EMDot’s potential, and provides a significant boost in identifying commercial opportunity and forming strategic industrial partnerships in the life science sector.
The company has already signed a joint development agreement with a world leading supplier of industrial inkjet print-heads, inks and peripheral equipment to commercial printing and industrial manufacturing markets, to accelerate the commercialisation of its technology.
Judging Panel Chair, Professor Cyril Hilsum CBE FREng, FRS commented: “The winners presented an ingenious system for controlled printing of tiny dots that was free of the clogging problems of inkjet printing. There are many potential applications, but the invention has particular significance for the manufacture of biological microarrays, and the deposition of ultra-small samples for lab-on-a-chip analysis.”
Source: www..qmul.ac.uk
