"Health Technology" - to develop an optical nose

The detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) is important for environmental monitoring, such as air quality control and food safety, and has recently found application in diagnosis of diverse diseases, from COVID-19 to diabetes and cancer. Traditional analytical methods such as gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectroscopy (MS), though accurate and reliable, require expensive equipment and are often time-consuming and laborious. Previous work in this area already demonstrated portable solutions with arrays of up to 64 sensors having been demonstrated close to the ability of the human nose. These solutions use surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and are cumbersome to apply (angled incidence, prism). Here, we will explore the guided mode resonance (GMR) technique, which presents a major innovation in field of artifical noses, because they offer a 10-100 fold higher sensitivity than SPR; we expect to reach commensurately higher sensitivity for the artificial nose. Moreover, the GMR modality has potential for a low-cost realisation.

The project is aligned with the EPSRC Programme Grant "Ubiquitous Optical Healthcare Technologies (ubOHT)(EP/X037770/1)" and firmly aligns with the EPSRC Healthcare Technology strategy. In this context, we will work with researchers at Strathclyde Universities who contribute analytical chemistry expertise and will contribute novel binder molecules for detecting the volatile compounds. The project also involves researchers at the Turing Institute whose unique skillset in data science will be essential for the interpretation of multidimensional readouts in the time-domain, given that binding affinities for volatiles are very low. The project is supported by Owlstone Medical who bring in the industrial angle and will give access to their mass-spectrometry based standards.