Wednesday 05 October 2016 04:30 PM
Irish researcher gets Kiwi pre-seed funding to commercialise new spectroscopy instrument
By Fiona Rotherham
Oct. 5 (BusinessDesk) - Irishman Brendan Darby arrived in New Zealand in 2011 with only a backpack to visit his brother;
five years on he’s completed his physics PhD and is commercialising a next generation spectroscopy instrument thanks to
government and philanthropic pre-seed funding.
Darby and the team at the Raman Lab (a joint venture between the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences in
Wellington’s Victoria University and the McDiarmid Institutes of Advanced Materials and Nanotechology) are experts in
spectroscopy, which is a technique used to identify chemicals that make up a substance.
He first got involved in physics at home in Dublin because he wanted to work on spacecraft. During his university days
he helped a company develop thermal protection layers for spacecraft and worked for an aerospace engineering company
repairing jet engines.
Once in New Zealand though Darby saw the light quite literally and did his PhD, just completed in August under Raman lab
leader Professor Eric Le Ru, on surface enhanced raman spectroscopy (SERS). You may need a degree to understand SERS but
basically it’s a technique that uses nanotechnology to enhance light signals to detect molecules.
Uses include quick detection of drugs and chemical warfare agents and in food quality analysis to detect and quantify
any dangerous elements.
Darby has used a $25,000 grant from the KiwiNet Emerging Innovator Fund to assess the commercial potential of CloudSpec,
a new technology that could change the way labs analyse ‘cloudy’ solutions. It’s the third grant under the fund which
was created after a donation from the Norman FB Barry Foundation.
Darby said since getting the grant he’s been able to get out and talk to various industry users and has had some
“positive conversations” about CloudSpec. Potential applications include food and water quality assurance, plus
enhancements of forensic testing, though, for now, Darby is keeping under wraps one particular application being
initially targeted.
Typically absorption spectroscopy works by shining a spectrum light through a sample and monitoring which colours get
transmitted and which are absorbed. But that doesn’t work well if the sample is cloudy or opaque and contains large
particulates like a fat globule in milk that scatter light in all directions. The lab workers then have to do a number
of steps to get the results they need.
Darby says his working prototype uses a new hardware configuration and processing techniques that are impervious to
light scattering and allows the monitoring to be done directly on cloudy samples.
“In the food and beverage industry current processes can degrade the integrity of the product whereas CloudSpec won’t
compromise it,” he said.
Darby has just secured an additional $188,000 of pre-seed accelerator investment from KiwiNet to take his working
prototype from the lab to industry and one step closer to setting up a company external investors could put money into.
The intellectual property is jointly owned by Darby and the university.
While doing his PhD, Darby was chair of the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientists Association (MESA) and aimed to get students
thinking about commercialisation, other opportunities outside academia, and increased collaboration.
MESA organised industry visits to students which led to a number getting internships in companies they wouldn’t normally
have interacted with inside academia, he said.
With the government channelling more funding into science that will lead to commercial outcomes rather than just
fundamental research, the role of scientists is changing “whether that is for good or bad”, he said.
“With a small country like New Zealand, it doesn’t have the money to fund massive blue sky projects as they do in the
US. Commercialisation is really important and becoming more important as funding gets tighter,” he said.
(BusinessDesk)
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