Sadly this year, I missed one of my most favourite occasions, the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Gala Dinner, when many of its prizes and awards are handed out. The top accolade on the night is the MacRobert Award which is given for an outstanding innovation with proven commercial promise and tangible societal benefit. As well as benefiting from the prestige of the award, the winners receive a gold medal and a £50,000 cash prize.
This year, HRH Princess Anne, The Princess Royal, presented the prize for engineering innovation to Oxfordshire-based SME Cobalt Light Systems.
Cobalt, which was up against UK engineering giant Rolls-Royce and the defence company QinetiQ’s spin-out, OptaSense, has pioneered a technique to determine the chemical composition of materials in containers and behind a range of other barriers, including skin.
This breakthrough led to the introduction of an airport security scanner earlier this year that may soon enable airports to relax the existing hand-luggage liquid ban. Indeed, use of the same technique is now being considered for other applications, including real-time diagnostic tools for cancer and bone disease.
The judging panel, representing the cream of modern British engineers and entrepreneurs from a range of disciplines, selected Cobalt for its potential to touch the lives of millions of people and, since the company was formed in 2008 as a spin-out from the Government’s Science and Technology Facilities Council company, as an excellent example of successful technology transfer from lab to market.
Cobalt’s technology was first developed conceptually by Cobalt’s Chief Scientific Officer in a true ‘Eureka’ moment at Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
Using a novel variant of the technique of Raman spectroscopy combined with advanced algorithms to distinguish between the barrier and what lies behind it, the technique is able to reliably identify the chemical composition of a substance in seconds.
Having initially used this technique to develop a machine for pharmaceutical companies that verifies the contents and quality of medicines, Cobalt then applied it to a security scanner that may enable airports to remove the existing hand-luggage liquid ban through a phased implementation over the next few years, in line with pending EU regulations.
The Insight100 system can analyse bottles of up to three litres, in order to determine if they contain anything considered a threat, without having to open them. The scanners have recently been deployed in eight of the top ten EU airports, including Heathrow and Gatwick, and a total of 65 airports in Europe have introduced the system since January 2014.
Now Cobalt is working with STFC and two UK universities, with funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), on research using the same technology that could lead to medical-grade systems that provide on-the-spot diagnosis of breast cancer and bone diseases such as osteoporosis. Prototypes are on trial is various hospitals.
In an earlier stage of research is the development of another system using the same non-invasive technique to analyse the chemical composition of breast tissue in the ‘shadows’ identified by mammograms, which is being developed in conjunction with the University of Exeter and STFC, with funding from EPSRC. You can read more at: http://www.raeng.org.uk.
Cobalt Light Systems is based in Abingdon in South Oxfordshire and benefits from its proximity to the Harwell Science Park, home to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory than spawned its technology. Announcements like this should remind us not to rest on our prize winning laurels. Competition remains intense in the race to the top!
