Ambri prepares its first instrument for market

Sydney-based nanotechnology company Ambri Limited is on track to deliver its first biosensor to the Australian market in June, after hooking up with local instrument manufacturer Vision Biosystems.

"We sent out scouts to the US looking for potential partners but we ended up finding them in our own backyard," said Ambri CEO and managing director Dr Joe Shaw.

"[Vision] has a GMP-approved facility and proven capability of tracking the design process."

Vision Biosystems is an Australian subsidiary of global company Vision Systems. Included in its track record was the successful development of Abbott Laboratories' top-selling haematology instrument Cell Dyn SMS.

Ambri's instrument is designed to detect and measure drugs hormones viruses, bacteria in whole blood by converting the measurement into an electrical signal.

Final in-house testing of the Ambri reader is currently being carried out at both companies' research labs.

"At first it did not occur to me to have our manufacturers close by, but it has become a huge advantage," Shaw said. "We have needed to work closely together on the development of the Ambri system."

Ian Macfarlane, senior executive of Vision Biosystems' sister company Invetech, said the company's clients often felt "some level of uncertainty" when taking their core science to the product development stage.

"Ambri is typically like this," Macfarlane said. "Our focus is to assist in the speed of product to market.

"We are working in parallel. While Ambri is doing the core science research, we are developing the instrument platform that embodies the core science." Invetech has also designed the disposable cartridges that will later be manufactured by Ambri.

Australian hospitals will be the first to use Ambri's diagnostic instrument, and later in the year it will be introduced into the US. "The US is 62 per cent of Ambri's potential market," Shaw said.

Every year, 100 million patients are admitted into US hospital emergency departments and given eight to nine tests. One of the first applications for the Ambri reader will be to detect the markers that indicate the incidence of a heart attack.

In order for current treatments to be effective, a heart attack must be diagnosed and treated within six hours. Current pathology laboratories take between four to 24 hours to deliver results, but Shaw said that Ambri's disposable sensor tests could test for three cardiac enzymes and deliver the results in five minutes.

Another key application will be rapidly detecting the pregnancy hormone hCG, Shaw said. In the US, 32 million women are admitted to hospitals every year and each one should be given a pregnancy test before any therapy or x-ray diagnostics procedures, otherwise there is a risk of harming an unborn baby. Current testing methods are often too slow, so the test is omitted - a situation Ambri hopes its reader will change.