Handheld lab receives INNOVIC gong

Victorian inventor, Micah Atkin, developer of the MycroLab portable diagnostic system, has received INNOVIC’s 2009 International Next Big Thing Award this morning in Melbourne.

Like the medical tricorder wielded by Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy in Star Trek, Micah Atkin's handheld medical diagnostic system is able to perform multiple tests on a sample as small as a drop of blood in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of processing by a conventional laboratory.

The first use for the handheld system will be to test for tuberculosis, a disease which kills over 2 million people per year and is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths.

“The Handheld medical diagnostic system is a very clever innovation and meets a real community need,” said Joss Evans, CEO of INNOVIC.

“It has the potential to change the lives of millions by providing low-cost, first world quality healthcare successfully in third world environments. It can also be deployed in clinics, surgeries and emergency rooms and eventually in homes." INNOVIC is a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping inventors develop and commercialise their ideas. Its Next Big Thing Award is open to entrants from around the world and awards winners with over $60,000 in cash and prizes.

Other category winners in 2009 are: INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 - Social/Community Benefit Fermiscan Breast Cancer Test - a new test using synchrotron-generated x-ray diffraction to detect the presence of breast cancer created by Professor Veronica James, with Sydney company Fermiscan bringing the invention to its final prototype.

INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 - Innovation Excellence Gigabit Wireless Transceiver on CMOS - a high speed, low cost chip that facilitates short range multi-gigabit transfer of data, wirelessly created by Victorian inventor Professor Stan Skafidis.

INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 - Green/Environmental Creative Water Technology , created by Victorian inventor Stephen Shelly to clean waste water with contaminant levels of more than 300,000ppm. (see attached)

INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 - International Winner 360 Paper Water Bottle . New York designer and inventor Jim Warner created a water bottle literally made from paper.

INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 - People's Choice Winner VideoTrace, a program that interactively generates realistic 3D models of objects from video created by Dr Anton van den Hengel, Director of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at the University of Adelaide.

Also recognised is 20 year old Victorian dance student Alya Manzart who has been highly commended in INNOVIC’s International Next Big Thing Award 2009 for the Bamboo de-brancher, a machine that safely removes the sideways shoots from bamboo.