Ambri hopes its tech can prevent endoscopy injury

Ambri is looking to expand the potential applications of its critical care diagnostic system, SensiDx System, enabling surgeons to rapidly detect bowel damage that can occur during an operation. The company is hoping that the system, which will be launched in Australia in the next few months, will be used in hospital emergency departments, to detect markers which indicate the incidence of a heart attack and the pregnancy hormone hCG.

It has the potential to detect and measure many drugs, hormones, viruses and bacteria in whole blood in less than five minutes.

Dr Michael Cooper, a Sydney endoscopy surgeon, said the morbidity and mortality arising from unidentified injury during endoscopy surgery was becoming a tragedy, and the cost to society of such these events was unacceptable.

Ambri is working closely with Dr Cooper to define the requirements for a diagnostic test for bowel damage that may have occurred during this type of endoscopy surgery.

The plan is to identify appropriate markers and adapt them for use on Ambri's system. Ideally, surgeons will be able to quickly diagnose bowel damage, and within five minutes, carry out a potentially life-saving repair which could otherwise result in serious illness and possibly death.

Managing director Dr Joe Shaw said it was a potentially large market for the Ambri biosensor, and one that Ambri was keen to develop.

He estimates that there were about 3.9 million endoscopic procedures worldwide per year, with somewhere between three and five serious events per 10,000 procedures.

The medico-legal, financial and social consequences of a missed bowel perforation are substantial, according to Ambri. A recent report in the British Medical Journal noted that failure to identify the injury was a key factor in the severity of the outcome.

Ambri is showing its system at the Australian Gynaecological and Endoscopy Society conference in Sydney this week.

The company says the system has the potential to detect and measure many drugs, hormones, viruses and bacteria in whole blood in less than five minutes.

Ambri's system will be a significant improvement on the current standard of between four hours and 24 hours for pathology laboratories. As well as cutting emergency waiting times for results, it should also reduce healthcare costs, the company says.