Blood clotting, or hemostatic, agents are a medical necessity to prevent bleeding after injury or during surgery. Currently available hemostatic agents are limited in their utility (e.g. poor shelf-life, toxic side-effects) or come from animal sources. This hemostatic agent is derived from a biopolymer found in fungi. It has exceptional blood-clotting activity, is antimicrobial, and biocompatible.

Many cancers are driven by hyperactive cell signaling proteins, known as kinases. Drugs that inhibit these kinases make attractive anticancer therapies. A bottleneck for kinase inhibitor development is being able to test whether inhibition is effective, for which current testing methods are inadequate. This method directly measures kinase activity in live cells, to better assess potential kinase inhibitors.

With modern gene editing technology, it is now possible to precisely repair genes that cause human disease. However, there is a bottleneck in getting the required gene editing components into the cells that are affected by the faulty gene. This technology solves this problem, creating a cellular delivery system for these gene editing tools.

Skin cancers are incredibly common, but they are difficult to detect at an early stage. We all have odd moles and bumps on our skin, but these are examined by a doctor maybe once a year, at most. With this app, patients can self-monitor their skin lesions and get an accurate prediction of cancer risk.

Any one patient is linked to a lot of data – from their personal details, medical history, reports from lab tests, medication or surgery details, data from wearables, the list goes on and becomes more complicated. This software makes the complicated simple, collecting and consolidating medical data into one easy and usable platform.

CAR-T cell therapy is an exciting new form of cancer therapy that uses the patient’s own immune system to attack cancer cells. However, CAR-T cells are difficult to monitor in a patient, preventing an assessment of whether they are working or not. These researchers have developed an easy solution to study leukaemia- and lymphoma-specific CAR-T cells.

Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML) is one of the deadliest blood cancers, with a 5-year survival rate of less than 25%. There has been no dramatic improvement in AML treatments since the 1970s, but this group of researchers has identified a druggable Achille’s Heel, specific to AML and other blood cancers.

Measuring how the brain controls muscle movement is of great value, for example in assessing physical rehabilitation, neurodegenerative or muscular degenerative diseases, and athletic training. Current techniques for this, however, lack depth of information about individual nerve-to-muscle-fibre functional connections. This technology provides the resolution for these individual connections, creating a sharper image of nerve-motor function.

The most common method of measuring blood pressure – the “cuff method” – is surprisingly inaccurate. Incorrect measurements lead to misdiagnosis and inappropriate treatment for hypertension, which is a major risk for cardiovascular disease. This device measures multiple physical parameters in a non-invasive manner to give a more accurate blood pressure measurement.

Biomarkers are molecules that enable assessment of disease from body fluids such as blood and saliva. Current methods for biomarker detection are time- and labour-intensive, and require bulky, and often expensive, machinery. As a solution to this, a small transportable device has been developed that detects your choice of biomarker on-the-spot.