By combining expertise in clinical biomarker development, bioinformatics and paper based microfluidics the consortium will develop a novel liver damage assay.

Over the course of 2 years the consortium filled with young and ambitious SMEs will develop a test that can quickly and easily identify early signs of liver damage in patients resulting in reduction of treatment costs and the optimisation of treatment.

Conditions resulting from damaged liver are a huge societal burden resulting in increase of costs for the healthcare, therefore robust and quick screening testing for liver damage would provide a viable solution to the problem.

The grant proposal has been ranked in the top 10 of applications within the region. The total associated project budget is €1.000.000. And the province of Zuid Holland will be awarding a subsidy of €349.996 towards the project for the realisation of its goals and deliverables.

Some good news to share. In the one year project, we will develop a glucose sensor for microbial fermentation.

Thorough control over any process that involves living organisms is essential to its success. Therefore, having a chance to frequently check how much food for your microorganisms left is of the highest importance. The problem with frequent control is its cost and labour involved, in addition, if we are considering experimental cultures which by nature are small, the volume of medium used for testing is becoming a problem which means that you will use medium for testing instead of feeding your microorganism.

Together with EV Biotech, we will take a close look into addressing these issues with our testing system. Our goal is to reduce volume of the samples necessary for glucose testing and labour related to the performance of the test. We will apply our microfluidic knowledge to meet these goals and create a user-friendly solution that EV Biotech will be able to quickly validate and apply for their microbial strain optimization.