Image: Conor Hayden
What started out as a device to help people with motor neurone disease has become a respiratory aid for various conditions.
Just last month, Dr Conor Hayden secured more than €600,000 from the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund for his ‘Ribbon device’, a non-invasive sensor to detect respiratory issues.
“The Ribbon device has its genesis in my PhD work, which focused on developing objective outcome measures for people living with motor neurone disease (MND),” Hayden said at the time.
“I am excited to move forward with the development of the Ribbon device, which has the potential to significantly improve patient outcomes through early, accurate diagnosis of respiratory decline, enabling timely intervention.”
Hayden completed undergraduate and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering at Trinity College Dublin, before undertaking a research assistant role with Dr Deirdre Murray in the Academic Unit of Neurology at Trinity. In this role, he looked at improving outcome measures for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of MND.
“There was a strong clinical element to the research as the academic unit is very closely linked to the MND clinic in Beaumont Hospital, both led by Prof Orla Hardiman,” Hayden tells SiliconRepublic.com.
“That applied engineering side appealed to me and when Deirdre supported the opportunity to convert the research assistant position to a PhD, I didn’t hesitate.”
The PhD gave Hayden more time to understand and develop solutions for improving how to measure outcomes for people with MND. “The links with Beaumont meant I worked a lot with clinicians and got feedback from people with MND. It also allowed me to learn about the steps needs to commercialise the research.”
Here, Hayden tells us more about his current work.
Tell us about your current research.
After I finished my PhD, I was invested in the area and wanted to further explore how we could translate what we had done into some more commercially focused solutions. I took a postdoctoral position with the Adapt centre in Trinity on a European project called PrecisionALS, which aims to provide a platform for all clinical research in ALS across Europe.
In parallel with engaging with industry partners and helping to set up a longitudinal clinical study on assessing new digital technologies, I continued to advance the novel devices that I had developed.
Other MND centres in Europe have expressed some interest in using our devices in their studies but it’s next to impossible to get ethical approval in other sites if there isn’t a dedicated person on the ground to lead the process. I had come into contact with bodies that help researchers commercialise their work, the Health Innovation Hub and Enterprise Ireland, during my PhD.
My other supervisor, Prof Bruce Murphy, who has extensive experience in this area, was a massive help.
I was pointed towards Enterprise Ireland’s feasibility grant, which can be used to employ an independent consultant to conduct a market assessment and explore potential routes to commercialisation. Very quickly, it became clear that there may be a market for the respiratory device I had developed during my PhD as it would have large applications outside of the (commercially small) MND space.
Following on from that I applied for Enterprise’s Ireland Commercialisation Fund which provides funding for two years and allows third-level researchers to translate their research into innovative and commercially viable products.
In your opinion, why is your research important?
My work is centred on a novel respiratory vital sign sensor, the Ribbon device. It aims to monitor breathing rate and volume continuously and unobtrusively for the first time, in a device which has been called “a game-changer” by the clinicians we interviewed. Currently, this cannot be achieved outside of the ICU.
One of the lessons I learned about the commercial journey was that I had to focus on the largest potential area of benefit first before moving into smaller ones. The sensor was first developed for use in the MND population but when we completed the feasibility study it was clear that it may have potential in the much broader area of respiratory monitoring.
The Ribbon device has the potential to eliminate delayed diagnosis of respiratory compromise, enabling earlier intervention for better patient outcomes and at lower costs to hospital healthcare systems. Failure to detect and treat respiratory compromise is associated with increased hospital length-of-stay, costs and mortality risk, and results in significant human and economic impact. Currently, there is no continuous, non-invasive monitoring solution for both respiratory rate and volume, which are essential measures for accurate monitoring and early detection.
What inspired you to become a researcher?
I was always interested in working with my hands and curious about how devices/tools worked. When it came time to decide what to study, engineering offered me the broadest area to explore.
My journey in research after graduating was a series of iterative steps: enjoying the research, working with good mentors and having the chance to work on novel research from the ground up.
What are some of the biggest challenges or misconceptions you face as a researcher in your field?
I think keeping postdoctoral researchers working in research is challenging. A lot of that comes down to funding and the academic environment. Unless they are looking for an academic position and building experience for it, I’ve seen a lot of PhD graduates move into industry. There are not a lot of academic positions available relative to the volume of graduates so that will always exist but if more funding was available to employ PhDs as postdocs on a competitive salary, then universities would retain the specialist knowledge that PhDs spent years acquiring rather than move into unrelated areas in industry. It would also mean more cutting-edge and innovative research could be carried out.
That also feeds into my other observation that as a researcher in academia there is a lot of freedom to move in directions that interest you. It is possible to focus on one or multiple areas such as commercialising your research while still teaching or engaging in more traditional academic areas. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve got to experience this.
Do you think public engagement with science and data has changed in recent years?
I think there’s been good and bad public engagements with science in the last few years. Personally, I think it’s been mostly good. I needed to collect data from a few hundred people during the Covid-19 pandemic and once the proper precautions were taken, people were happy to engage with me. Also, any of the people with MND I recruited were great to work with. They were all actively interested in helping develop novel tools. Maybe that will change in future years as people become more distrustful of what their data might be used for.
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