The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA) has, for more than a century, been a meeting place for Sweden’s future. IVA builds bridges between the business community, the public sector, academia and the political sphere. Bringing together the expertise and experience of about 1,300 Academy Fellows and 250 member companies, IVA has the last five years annually presented a list that highlights current research with the potential to create benefits through commercialisation, business and method development or societal impact.
Among these carefully selected research projects from Sweden's higher education institutions, where all participants have an interest in increased contacts with the business community for application and further development of their projects, we find several researchers from NanoLund.
This year’s theme for the IVA 100-list is “Technology at the service of humanity in climate change, energy supply, societal wealth technologies, cybersecurity and crisis preparedness”, and below you can read the researchers’ own descriptions of their projects:
NanoLoci: Image analysis for early disease detection
“The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted that crisis preparedness requires disease detection methods that are quick, scalable, and economically viable. Unfortunately, rapid tests are inaccurate for analyte concentrations, whereas more sophisticated techniques are expensive and time-consuming.
Nanostructured surfaces offer better sensitivity, but refined computational techniques are required to unlock the full potential in accurate and precise detection. We have created NanoLoci, an image analysis software, which can deliver consistent, optimized results for all end-users. By enabling non-expert users to harness the power of computational techniques and combining them with cutting-edge nanowire technology, lower concentrations of disease markers can be detected. With this technology, nanowire biosensors can be taken to the next level, making them accessible and relevant for potential applications in early and affordable disease diagnostics.”
Inexpensive solar cells and large-scale fuel production with a luminous iron molecule
“We have created an iron molecule that can produce hydrogen and electricity using sunlight. We have recently shown that iron, the second most abundant metal in the Earth's crust, can replace expensive and rare metals currently used in photocatalysts and solar cells.
By creating an inexpensive and easily accessible photocatalyst that can produce green hydrogen without electricity from the grid, large-scale hydrogen production is made possible without competing for the electricity needed for other purposes in society. This large-scale hydrogen production enables the transition to fossil-free fuels for heavy transport and faster scale-up of hydrogen use in industry.
The solar cells we are developing based on iron are easy to manufacture and are also semi-flexible and transparent. Within a few years, these can be an alternative to existing solar cell technologies, especially for low-intensity indoor light, and then constitute a cheap and environmentally friendly energy source for home electronics (internet of things) on a global scale.”
Data-driven microscopy
“High-quality data is crucial for all academic and commercial research. Microscopy is a central hardware choice of many life sciences research teams due to its unrivaled in-context and qualitative nature.
Manual effort, bad software, and low bandwidth plague microscopy use and inhibit reproducibility, innovations, tempo, and quality of findings for research teams globally.
Cytely Data-Driven Microscopy (DDM) eliminates human bias and provides reproducible data sets using automation and built-in cross-referenced quality control. DDM is hardware agnostic and provides automated and pre-built image-acquisition pipelines, giving smart insights without time investment in setup or maintenance.
One run with DDM usually saves teams weeks of manual labor, provides 10x lower false discovery rates, gives reproducible data, and uncovers findings that would not be found manually.
Cytely DDM will 10x your research findings and helps you release more research and value to society or your business!”