Dr Eric Moore wins the Clinical Impact Award at GatewayUCC SPRINT Awards 2021

15 Mar 2021

GatewayUCC this week announced the winners of its fifth GatewayUCC SPRINT Awards for 2021. We are delighted that Dr Eric Moore from the School of Chemistry and Tyndall National Institute was awarded the UCC GatewaySPRINT Clinical Impact Award for SMARTProbe.

SMARTProbe

SMARTProbe is an adjunct technology that can be used in conjunction with existing or emerging optical techniques such as ultra sound or advances in imaging.

Dr Moore commented; “It takes too long for breast cancer patients to receive a diagnosis. Millions of women worldwide undergo breast biopsies following suspicious mammograms. Up to 80 % of these biopsies are not indicative of cancer. Women suffer significant apprehension and anxiety waiting for these negative pathology results and can be waiting up to 10-12 days to be told of the outcome. This key issue of waiting for the diagnosis and the psychological impact should not be underestimated. Clinicians will use the SMARTProbe technology because it will perform real time detection of breast cancer during biopsies. It would provide radiologists with immediate information to make a better informed decision about whether the tissue is benign or suspected of cancer. There would be huge benefits to women as the detection would be in minutes instead of days."

How SMARTProbe works

It has a special sensor incorporated into the tip of a core biopsy needle. The needle‐probe will be inserted into the breast under ultrasound guidance to the lesion of interest. The technology can be used to “taste” the suspicious lesion to determine its malignant status. A traffic light system will inform the radiologist of the nature of the lesion as either healthy, benign or malignant. If a biopsy is desired, the core biopsy needle can be fired at the exact location where a suspicious reading has been indicated and a sample obtained. If a healthy or benign signal is indicated the radiologist may chose not take a biopsy and spare the patient the potential risk from the procedure (cutting of tissue, bleeding and risk of infection) and adopt a different management process. It would therefore offer a more efficient clinical pathway for breast cancer detection and diagnosis. 

GatewayUCC

Part of UCC Innovation, GatewayUCC supports researcher-led start-ups and spin out companies.

The companies it has worked with since 2012 have created more than 400 jobs. It has supported over 60 start-ups and pre startups based on Intellectual property from the university. These IP based companies have contributed more than €22m a year in salaries to the local economy.

SPRINT Accelerator Programme

SPRINT was developed by GatewayUCC Business Incubator Manager, Myriam Cronin, as a support for the pipeline of Spin-Out and Researcher-Led start-ups seeking accommodation in the GatewayUCC Incubation Centre. Designed to support early-stage start-ups, entrepreneurs and UCC-based researchers, SPRINT focuses on the commercialisation of UCC-generated technologies and routes to market.

For more on this story contact:

Dr Eric Moore e.moore@ucc.ie

Myriam Cronin, Business Incubator Manager  myriam.cronin@ucc.ie