A new blueprint captures 'human on a chip'

Blueprint Product Design in Leeds has transformed the way it does business – from being purely a sub-contractor to creating their own branded products and now playing a key role in a €6.33 million Horizon 2020 digital health project.

CEO Mick Karol credits EEN in the North of England with guiding him through a radical re-engineering of his company:

“We risked everything – and I mean everything – to go from a sub-contract business charging for our time to using our own money and funding to become a product-based business,” he said. “We couldn’t have done it on our own.”

The successful change of direction is largely due to the Innovate 2 Succeed innovation management programme, funded by Enterprise Europe Network through Innovate UK.

EEN network advisers helped the firm win €500,000 of Horizon 2020 funding for its part in a multi-national ‘human on a chip’ project co-ordinated by the University of Leeds, called HISENTS (High level Integrated Sensor for Nanotoxicity Screening).

It reflects Blueprint Product Design’s new offer as a turn-key service in the development and marketing of technical and scientific products.

With that in mind, he has a world-wide, three-year, exclusive licence on a water toxicity sensor from the University of Leeds. Potential applications include an aquaculture tool for fish farms; chemical terrorism detection; and health and the environment.

Skills within the business now extend from establishing a need for the product through early-stage market evaluation all the way through to full product development and manufacture.

For the Horizon 2020 project, where partners have still to articulate an application for their nano-particle toxicity detection technology, Blueprint Product Design has added a post-doctoral chemist to the team although the company has no role in developing hardware or software.