Team:Manchester/Human Practices/Industries
Industries
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FREDsense
We had a conversation with Mr David Lloyd, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of FREDsense Technologies. He provided valuable insights into the drinking habits and culture in Canada, which prompted us to have a discussion on the prospects of our AlcoPatch being marketed in Canada.
He highlighted that drink driving in Canada is a major issue and that methods of measuring blood alcohol levels can often have huge influences on legal cases. He added "any tool which can accurately read out someone’s blood ethanol concentration would be useful. However, these tests would need to be very quick as it would be impractical to have to wait for 10-30 minutes for an accurate reading". This led us to explore two different mechanisms with different response time and accuracy.
We also discussed concerns with regards to the acceptance of the public on the usage of genetically modified organisms (GMO). He mentioned that most members of the public are not aware of the low risk associated with GMOs. This issue has been raised on many occasions during our outreach events and suggests that there is an underlying lack of awareness on the safety of using GMOs.
IBCarb
We had a meeting with Dr.Doherty, the Network Manager of IBCarb. We pitched our project idea in order to get funding from IB Carb. She was very impressed with our project proposal and agreed to fund our project, enabling us to attend the Giant Jamboree. We also received many useful feedbacks from her, which were later used to improve certain aspects of our project. She also suggested that bouncers and bartenders would have great use of the AlcoPatch to measure the level of intoxication of consumers. This would help avoid the bartenders from selling alcohol to individuals who are very intoxicated.
NPRONET
We had a discussion with the networking manager of NPRONET (funded network in biotechnology and bioenergy), 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, an issue which has been brought up by other individuals we have spoken to - Alcohol Academy and ESOF
Manchester Enterprise Centre
We had a meeting with Lynn Shepherd, the director of Manchester Enterprise Centre and Martin Henry, an Enterprise Academic Lecturer about our project. They intrigued us with their question on 'how our AlcoPatch (if the prototype is made) is going to be cheaper current breathalysers'. However, we could not give them an accurate estimate on the cost of our AlcoPatch as we are currently at the early stages of our proof of concept.
They suggested we investigate whether our AlcoPatch is just a novel idea or a recalibration of existing designs. They also mentioned that we should be cautious about making too much of our product’s science available to the public as it could have patenting issues, leading to our meeting with Andrea Vero, an Intellectual Property Solicitor.
After this meeting , the question on cost led us to rethink our project idea. We came up with some interesting ideas, including using the mechanism behind AlcoPatch to detect other chemicals, such as glucose. This led us to conduct a pilot experiment on glucose. The new patch could be designed to be easily interchangeable during manufacture to measure different chemicals in the sweat. This would allow an array of patches, which measures different chemicals, to be created. This would reduce production costs and would be of interest to many companies and corporations.
BioProNET
We had a meeting with Prof. 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 could have marketing issues. As such, if we were to make the actual prototype, we would look for suitable alternatives for ABTS that does not pose a risk to the consumers (
Our Safety Page).
We also discussed about the financial aspect of the patch; Will it be more cost effective than the breathalyser? This question was also brought up during the meeting with Lynn Shepherd, the director of Manchester Enterprise Centre . Additionally, they suggested seeing an Intellectual Property (IP) attorney in order to protect and patent our project. This was a new unexplored area of project that we had not thought about before the meeting. Therefore, we decided to contact an IP Attorney (Ward Hadaway and Venner Shipley) to obtain more information about the legal process that could be involved with the production of our AlcoPatch.
Brightside Brewery
We had an interesting meet up with Carley from Brightside Brewery, a family run local brewery. She suggested that our AlcoPatch might not be useful to the vanilla student audience of drinkers. This is due to a culture of drinking habits where people might not necessarily be interested in monitoring their alcohol consumption, although experiments with a working prototype has the potential to show different results.
She also suggested possible interest in the health sector for people with undiagnosed health issues such as alcohol abuse. The National Health Sector (NHS, UK) might be able to use these patches as part of an educational tool 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.
However, she believed that breweries might not find the patch useful. Bars on the other hand, have the potential to be a market for AlcoPatch. Although It would not be in their interest to limit patron's consumption of alcohol, the patch could be used as a deterrence tool. This opnion also conferred with the suggestion from (Dr Doherty), Network Manager of IBCarb .
