The Droplet Microfluidic wearable and portable analysers deliver simple-to-use, reliable and cost-effective solutions suitable for liquid sampling and measuring a range of substances including glucose, lactate, pyruvate, hormone, therapeutic drugs like lithium, propofol and other biomarkers.
Traditional blood and tissue sampling methods and offline analysis give you delayed snapshots of data at intervals. This misses out on real-time information and importantly the trends of change, critical information when determining care.
Our point-of-care analyser is a platform technology that can measure and monitor various biomarkers including lactate, glucose, hormone, and therapeutic drugs in near real-time, with accuracy comparable to currently available lab equipment. Trusted data and autonomous measurement without interfering with patients’ lives. An enabler of precision medicine and personalised healthcare.
Nano litre droplet enables high frequency sampling and measurement, to provide continuous and automated data. It removes the need for repeated sample withdrawal, and transportation to the lab for testing.
Droplet analysers can monitor a variety of drugs with narrow therapeutic windows at the point-of-care, like Lithium treating bipolar, propofol for anaesthesia. This facilitate informed medical decision making and can improve the patient outcome.
Droplet analysers can connect to different sampling catheters (filter/ultrafiltration, microdialysis, microneedle and microneedle array), making it a versatile platform for measuring from blood, saliva, interstitial fluids, cerebrospinal fluids and other body fluids.
Droplet analysers miniaturising the widely used wet chemical assays and optical detection, each sett of data produced are of the accuracy comparable with central lab (offline) analysis.
Continuous lactate assays with droplet microfluidics. A two-step reaction with droplet microfluidics ensures the device can measure the full physiological range up to 20 mM with a limit of detection of 0.16 mM.
The sterilised wearable device can be assembled in one step. The device can connect to various sampling probes e.g. ultrafiltration probe, microdialysis catheter, or microneedle and microneedle arrays.
FOUNDER & INVENTOR
Prof. Niu is the inventor of the droplet analyser technology, the founder and director of DropSci.
He is a professor at the University of Southampton. He has published >100 peer-reviewed scientific papers on microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip, applied 7 patents, led multiple UK research grants (totally >£3M) as the PI and jointed many others (over £5M).
Prof. Niu is also a serial entrepreneur, has founded and cofounded three spinout companies including Droplet Scientific. He possesses rich experience in spin-out and product development. He has founded SouthWestSensor Ltd (SWS) and served as (part-time) CEO, CTO, and latest Scientific Advisor from Oct. 2022. SWS has raised several million pounds of investments, developed and marketed water sensors (analysers) using similar droplet microfluidic technology. The in-situ water analyser can measure accurately nitrite/nitrate/Ammonium in river water or estuary 8000 times/day, requiring a cartridge change only every 3 months.
