Causeway Sensors Limited, a Queen’s University Spin Out Company are developing breakthrough plasmonic sensors for commercial application in the world of drug manufacturing, and are the HIRANI Company of the month for October.
David Kane, Lead Engineer, shares with us how it all started:
“We originally came out of the Physics department at QUB; after years of research, a novel nanostructured surface had been developed – as well as a way to manufacture it repeatedly in a so-called “self-assembling”. We then faced the challenge of how to apply it. One of the “issues” with our technology in the early days was that it was so flexible – it had applications ranging from jewellery to life sciences. The latter, needless to say, is where we ended up.
“When it came time to spin out, we had great support from QUBIS, the university’s investment/innovation arm, and then had venture funding from Kernel Capital, who had a specialism in high technology companies like us. Causeway Sensors is also part of the Smart Nano NI consortium, aiming to boost the photonics industry in Northern Ireland – this is a £63.9M, UKRI-funded programme and has been instrumental in really propelling us forwards.
“As Lead Engineer, I look after the hardware design and the regulatory aspects, as well as contributing to the strategic direction of the company. In a startup like Causeway, you do, of course, end up wearing a thousand other hats as the company evolves, plus you have to have a finger on the pulse of all the different branches of the technology too. I’m a physicist by training, so our sensor and the photonics science behind it is second nature, but I had to get up to speed on the basics of the biology and biochemistry involved in our product too, which has been interesting, but tough.
Having the opportunity to take fundamental R&D from academic labs and productise it so that it can be applied quickly and have the maximum positive impact on everyone’s lives is insanely challenging, but it’s also hugely rewarding. That’s certainly a big part of why I – and the rest of our phenomenal team at Causeway – do what we do every day.
Causeway Sensors is Belfast-based and we’ve been thriving off the very high quality of scientists in all areas that Northern Ireland has – getting high quality hires has never been difficult for us and we’ve had a great relationship with both universities in terms of internships and graduate roles, as well as finding great people for later-stage roles.
On the other hand, there aren’t really any monoclonal antibody manufacturers in NI (if you are one, we’d love to hear from you!), so our initial customer base is very much in UK/RoI/EU and that adds a layer of complexity when developing these initial deployments.
Our core product is TITAN, an antibody quantification platform. It’s an R&D device – an instrument for the production floor is coming soon – and its aim is to take in a sample from a bioprocess and give the specific desired protein concentration per unit volume. Other tools on the market do some of this, but TITAN’s strength is in its speed, ease of use and the fact you can feed a single sample through TITAN, but run multiple assays. It’s a really flexible, exciting device and we’re getting great feedback from our validation partners at the moment, both in industry and academia.
We still have a few slots open in our validation trials, so if TITAN sounds of interest to you, please get in touch and we can have a chat – it’s really simple and low-friction to get involved.
The core sensing technology and the biological layering that supports the assays on the biosensor have both been developed in-house at Causeway, leveraging the considerable technical expertise in both areas that exists within the company.
To give you an idea of the complexity of making our sensors, each one is made up of millions of gold rods that are smaller than the wavelength of light – to get good results, all of these have to be the same shape, same height and in a regular pattern. Now do that reliably and economically over thousands of chips coming off the line and you start to understand how it’s a tricky thing to get right!
On the biology side, tuning the system – both the hardware and the biochemistry – to give the highly accurate, repeatable results that our customers need to drive their drug discovery forward has taken a lot of blood, sweat and expertise; we started as a physics company, but now we’re a truly multi-disciplinary company.
We’re in the process of taking our TITAN technology off the R&D benchtop and also applying it to the production line, allowing for vastly improved process control and automation for our customers, both of which should enhance the quality of the therapies being produced, while lowering the cost.
We’re also improving the hardware’s capability in terms of throughput and adding to our library of assays – if you have an assay-development project that you feel might work on the TITAN platform, we’d be keen to talk.
We launched a Beta Program earlier this year and we’ve got active trials of TITAN ongoing in the field right now – we’re still welcoming people on to this program and it’s incredibly easy to get involved.
Causeway Sensors is the SME lead for the new Photonics Innovation cluster, which recently received funding from Invest Northern Ireland to carry out a feasibility study. The cluster is designed to link SMEs and larger stakeholders together to boost the photonics industry in Northern Ireland.
A large number of life sciences companies rely on optical technology, particularly around sensing, and you may well benefit from being involved in the cluster – if you think this could be applicable to you, please get in touch via our contact page on the Causeway Sensors website!”
