We had an interesting conversation with a few police officers who were patrolling the local area. After explaining our project, we asked them more about current methods used to test intoxication levels. They explained that not all police officers are deployed with a breathalyser, only a select few. They also voiced out the discomfort of having to carry around the bulky and heavy breathalysers. However, they were particularly impressed with the reasonable accuracy of the breathalyser.

They further went on to explain how the 2 minute lag time might affect the accuracy of the breath alcohol results. An alternative to a breathalyser would need to be faster or at least nearly as fast. Thus, our AlcoPatch being small, compact and (potentially) cheap, it could serve as a good alternative to bulky breathalyser units. This would also allow every police officer to be deployed with a tool of their own.

The National Health Service (NHS) is a publicly funded national healthcare system for England. We had the opportunity to speak to Kelly O’Brien, a Drug and Alcohol Education Officer of Healthy Schools Manchester, about our project. She mentioned that our project reminded them of a pH indicator, and recommended that a device which could detect ethanol in solutions would be another alternate use for our AlcoPatch. She said that the AlcoPatch would not have much use for the NHS support groups. However, she suggested that students in Manchester who drink recreationally might benefit from this patch if they were interested in controlling their alcohol intake.

She also mentioned that it would be interesting to find out the implications of creating an AlcoPatch prototype and disseminating them to the public. It would be curious to find out if the patch would encourage people to reduce their alcohol intake and drink within the safe limits.

After some discussion with Andrea Vero an Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer we were told that in order to patent something, it needs to be new, or be combined in a new way. Then we would need to show that the product can be manufactured. Patents can’t be applied if they have been introduced into the public domain. We would need to contact a patent attorney to tell them all instances of when we have made our project public and what we have exposed to the public domain. After this they would be able to tell us whether the product is patentable and what would need to be changed for it to become patentable.

Also we discussed trademarking of the ‘AlcoPatch’ and ‘E.lcoholi’ names, we would need to check if anyone has similar or the same names and also see if they are okay to use. There limitations to what names can be trademarked - we can’t just use trademark a name like ‘alcohol measuring tool’ as many people will want to use this general name for things. Also, we need to check the correct class of our product then check the ™ names to avoid anyone making claims because of us. After the meeting Andrea told us that she would contact a patent attorney and get back to us to arrange a meeting.

We spoke to Matthew Handley a patent attorney from Venner Shipley as recommended by Andrea Vero. He told us that patents are based on novelty where there is an ‘inventive step’ of some sort. Furthermore, a patent cannot be made if there has been ‘absolute disclosure’ where everything about our research and designs have been made public. To determine whether our research is patentable we would have to determine what we haven’t shared publicly, then decide if this would be enough to warrant patenting it.

Because the broad product has been disclosed it can’t be patented so we would need to find what has been disclosed, then look at what is left and whether it is marketable. Also, people who were not ‘skilled people’ in synthetic biology who wouldn’t be able to replicate the experiments are not a threat to patent applications. However, our wiki website is a problem as it can be easily found and will remain in the public domain, while individual meetings can be forgotten, websites can be traced and found in the future. The content in the website would severely weaken our application.

We would need to know what we disclosed in all of our endeavours and know if we made it clear that our meetings were confidential. Furthermore, we would need to know how significant the information was and if it was enough for someone to reproduce our research. The information which we gave to companies and the public was theory, we didn’t give them detailed measurements and instructions on how to make the mechanisms, simply an overview, which were not confirmed to work in practise yet as we hadn’t finished experiments.

Mr Wojcik from Scram Systems (an ethanol biosensor company) says that our product might be more suited for the health services market. Some reasons for this were that our passive device was suited more towards self-help. This confers with what Dr Smith said at the UK Meet up. Mr. Wojcik said that he could see people wanting to purchase this product if they were wanting to keep track of their intake and he could see medical services and rehabilitation services wanting this product to allow people to become more aware of how much they were drinking. However, he believes that in the US there is not much demand currently for this product as he thinks the culture of drinking is done with intoxication in mind - in effect, intoxication is the aim of drinking, so people are already aware that they are drinking, perhaps even aware they are drinking too much.

He mentioned that there are commercial issues with ethanol detection patches - mainly their durability. Some companies claim their patches last for a week or more, but in reality it's much less than that as general activities gradually weaken the device. He says that to market something like our product we'd need proof of concept. He suggests we look at papers relating to how well alcohol is emitted from various parts of the body, as well as investigating the variation in the correlation between ethanol in the sweat depending on the geography of the body, as there is a lot of variation with sweat ethanol through skin. For this reason we would market the ‘Alcopatch’ as Their product is described as "semi quantitative" because of these types of variation.

We talked about some other products in the market like smart phone apps to test breath based on the B.A.C. curve to the legal level with limited success. Other products like skin patches for drug testing in the 1980's marketed for alcohol testing had the same problem; the alcohol would diffuse backwards. Also, the patches would need to be removed and sent off to a lab which took time, our product however would give a real time detection and indication which is very practical.

We had a phone call with Dr. Mukherjee and told him about our project and how we were intending to go to Boston to present at the Jamboree, then mentioned that our AlcoPatch would be of use to anyone who would like to be aware of the ethanol they are consuming. He couldn't see his patients benefiting from the patch; in his practice he sees children who suffer from brain damage associated with mothers who over drank before birth. So the AlcoPatch would not be useful to this area of the Health sector. The AlcoPatch is solely aimed at the awareness of the presence of alcohol in someone who is consuming it.