Irish researcher gets Kiwi funding to commercialise spectroscopy instrument

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.

Dr Darby and the team at the Raman Lab (a joint venture between the chemical and physical sciences School at Wellington's Victoria University and the McDiarmid Institutes of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology) are experts in spectroscopy, 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 study Dr Darby helped a company develop thermal protection layers for spacecraft and worked for an aerospace engineering company repairing jet engines.

Once in New Zealand though, he saw the light quite literally and did his PhD under Raman lab leader Professor Eric Le Ru, on surface enhanced raman spectroscopy (SERS), a technique using nanotechnology to enhance light signals to detect molecules. Uses include quick detection of drugs and chemical warfare agents and detecting and quantifying any dangerous elements in food quality analysis.

Dr 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.

Since getting the grant, Dr Darby says 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, he 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.

Dr 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 existing processes can degrade the integrity of the product whereas CloudSpec won't compromise it," he says.

He 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 Dr Darby and the university.

While doing his PhD, Dr Darby was chairman 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 academia, he says.

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."

"A small country like New Zealand doesn't have the money to fund massive blue sky projects as they do in the US. Commercialisation is important and becoming more important as funding gets tighter," he says.

(BusinessDesk)