A few members of our team went to see the networking manager of NPronet, Ms Sarah Shephard. She was very forth coming of our project but advised us on getting our lab work done sooner due to the proof of concept element to our project. She also highlighted the issue of the Alcopatch becoming a game amongst young adults.

Lynn Shepherd, the director of Manchester Enterprise Centre and Martin Henry asked us about how we intended for our patch to eventually be cheaper than current breathalysers and electric devices. We said that in order to get a more accurate account for costs of a prototype we would need to do further research into it, but we are not at that stage in our experimentation yet.

They also suggested we investigate whether what we were creating was novel or just a recalibration of existing designs. They suggested getting in contact with Curtis Dobson to ask if they could take a look at our models to understand the science behind them. They mentioned that we should be cautious about making too much of our product’s science available to the public as it could copied as we haven’t copyrighted anything yet. (meeting with Andrea Vero IP lawyer)

We also thought after the meeting that perhaps we could suggest that we could interchange chemicals with ethanol (in theory) like glucose (we did use glucose as pilot experiment). Which would mean that a patch could be designed to be easily interchangeable during manufacture to measure different chemicals in the sweat. Meaning a brand of patches which measure different chemicals could be created, which would standardise production to reduce production and design costs in the future. This model could become a business in itself and a cheap patch which can be made to measure different chemicals would be interest to many companies and corporations.

Two representatives of our team had a meeting with Professor Alan Dickinson (co director of BioProNET) and Dr Jo Flannelly ( network manager of BioProNET). They were very pleased with our project but also gave us an array of feedback for us to think about. Importantly they mentioned that ABTS is a carcinogenic substance. Therefore, the cell free mechanism couldn’t be marketed. Due to this, if we were to prolong the project we would look for a substance which acts in the same way as ABTS but isn’t harmful to the consumers of this product ( Our Safety Page).

They also made the point of financing the patch, is it really more cost effective than the breathalyzer and how much is the ptfe membrane we propose to use to enclose the reagents? Additionally, they suggested seeing an IP attorney in order to protect and patent our project. This was a new unexplored area of project that we hadn’t thought about yet. Therefore, we decided to contact an IP Attorney and get some more information about the legal process that could be involved with the production of our AlcoPatch. ( Ward Hadaway and Venner Shipley)

Carley from Brightside Brewery suggested that this tool might not be useful to the vanilla student audience of drinkers as there is a culture of drinking where people might not necessarily be interested in monitoring their alcohol consumption, although experiments with a working prototype would show if there is interest for them. Perhaps, if the patch was marketed towards certain themes which students might like, then maybe there would be more uptake, themes like cartoons or films etc. make it fun.

Carley suggested possible interest in the health sector, there could be people with undiagnosed health issues like violence which is triggered by consuming too much alcohol, a patch which monitors alcohol intake would help prevent violent situations perhaps. The NHS might use these patches as a part of education for people to know what the limit is so they best know how to drink responsibly. She mentioned that the police could get involved with alcohol awareness schemes and this patch might be a way to improve that.

We asked her whether she thought that breweries might find the patch useful and she said that they would have no use for them. Bars however, would have plenty of uses for them, but would they want to? It would not be in their interest to limit patron's consumption of alcohol. However, the patch could be used as a deterrent, for example difficult customers at bars who are drunk are told by bartenders that they cannot be served anymore. Quite often drunk people demand justification for being refused service, this patch could act as a back-up or justification tool for bartenders. This suggestion also conferred with what Dr Doherty (Meeting with IB Carb) suggested.