Product Design Management: Funded PhD: Packaging, Prototyping and Scale-up Manufacturing of Next Generation Multiplexed Graphene-based Biosensors for Detection of Alzheimer’s Disease

Swansea University is a UK top 30 institution for research excellence (Research Excellence Framework 2014), and has been named Welsh University of the Year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide.

Supervisors: Dr Daniele Doneddu (First Supervisor), Prof Nicholas Rich (Co-supervisor), Dr Frederic Boy (Co-Supervisor) - School of Management

Start date: 1st July 2017

This fellowship is funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks, Swansea University and Prognomics Ltd.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects more than 7 million people in Europe and this figure is expected to double every 20 years. Despite intensive efforts, no disease-modifying treatments or preventive strategies are available. The lack of specific, sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostics to identify people with early-stage AD to be included in clinical drug intervention trials is among the main reasons for many notable trial failures. The main challenges in developing the required diagnostics are identification of AD biomarkers and development of their detection techniques.

This PhD Early Stage Research (ESR) Fellow will design effective packaging and Point of Care systems for AD medical diagnostics.

The core sensing will be based on core graphene and SiNW biosensing technology (electrochemical functionalisation) developed within the consortium and particularly at Swansea University. The ESR will apply Design for Manufacturing (DfM, drawing from medical and other sectors) with the aim to integrate the core electrochemical platform within a packaged device (through the development and integration of microfluidics technology and electronics readout) system that can be used within the neurodegenerative disease clinical context, in particular AD, as well as explore potential for home/care home use to monitor disease progression as well as patient’s response to treatment. The research work will be initiated with developing an initial understanding of the design requirement for such device and the overall system, conducted through parallel research studies involving field work interaction with patients as well as clinicians and other key stakeholders within the medical diagnostics value chain and other advanced manufacturing sectors. A parallel phase of the study, via action research, of the process of DfM within the host company, Prognomics Ltd., will be conducted. Novel techniques will be utilised and combined to incrementally refine the feasible design criteria from concept to prototype. The work will then progress to design and system integration leading to a packaged device first, and a full Point of Care system next, with an ongoing extensive testing body of work conducted within laboratory (in close collaboration with the other ESRs within the Sensors Work Package, as well as other ESRs within the Biomarker Discovery, Validation and Trials, and Exploitation and Entrepreneurship work packages. as well as clinical and care home environment.

The fellow will have access to the resources of the academic resources of the School of Management at Swansea University and the state of the art laboratory facilities at Swansea University’s Centre for Nanohealth and Institute of Life Science, where the host company, Prognomics Ltd. is located, including supercomputing modelling and device characterisation.

This PhD project will be undertaken at the School of Management, and the ESR will be hosted by University Spinout Prognomics Ltd.. Prognomics has access to the University facilities, including the Institute of Life Science, The Centre for NanoHealth (CNH) (a joint venture between Engineering, Medicine and Science - integrating nanotechnology into medical science applications to provide healthcare solutions to healthcare providers and the healthcare industry – for the development and integration of the microfluidics technology) and the supercomputing modelling capabilities offered by the High Performance Computing Wales (HPC-W) infrastructure, which is currently undergoing a large upgrade.