The proposed project investigated feasibility of WaterScope’s current system in the European market, in particular for the regulatory and contractual water testing market. WaterScope is a Cambridge University spin-out developing a rapid, simple to use water testing system for the developing world. The system has been trialled in one of the largest refugee camps in the modern world, and the organisation has won the University of Cambridge, Vice Chancellor’s Overall Impact Award. WaterScope has raised over £460,000 of non-dilutive funding from grants and competitions. The proposed project is to investigate the use of our technology in the European market to expand identify a developed world market that our existing system can translate into. WaterScope’s automated testing system allows for a much faster test, with results obtained in less than 6 hours - quicker than anything on the market at the moment - with results automatically quantified. In addition to this WaterScope’s novel cartridge makes sample preparation simple, significantly reducing human error and sample preparation times.
In the project we identified the key stakeholders in the market, including distributors, manufacturers, water testing labs and customers of water testing labs. With testing frequency increasing due to EU regulation, we approached customers of water testing labs to identify whether this was a viable market, to offer on-site testing to companies who would typically send samples to labs. We visited a company in Germany who represented a typical customer of water testing labs, as well as one of the largest water testing labs in the UK. With interviews from customers and water testing labs, we identified that this market is not suitable for our technology. Largely this is due to the large requirement of a testing system to be able to conduct a range of tests which requires significant R&D to implement.
Through contacts at the University of Cambridge, we identified urinary tract infections (UTI) as a potential market. Almost all patients with a suspected UTI will receive broad-spectrum antibiotics after testing with a dipstick in GP surgeries. Over two-thirds of patients that are prescribed antibiotics in the UK do not show evidence of UTI infection, which is greatly increasing the burden of antimicrobial resistance. Current methods to test for UTI include bacterial culture and antimicrobial susceptibility tests, usually conducted in centralised diagnostic laboratories. In the UK, over 600,000 UTIs occurred between 2013-2015; globally it was estimated that 92 million people were affected in 2013. The requirement of external triage results in a large cost to the NHS, and slow turnaround; with patients unable to wait 2-5 days the best course of action is to prescribe broad-spectrum antibiotics in GP surgeries. Our solution is to develop a compact desktop system to bring near-patient testing of antibiotic susceptible bacteria in UTIs into GP surgeries or care homes. With a disposable cartridge and a compact desktop microscope that automates colony culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing, we can simplify testing and allow it to be performed outside diagnostic microbiology laboratories, whilst giving comparable results. This allows the correct antibiotics to be prescribed to the patient within hours rather than days. We successfully conducted a proof-of-concept in the lab and applied for funding (£120,000 to run a small scale clinical study in March 2020 which was successful, to further this project.
