Castlebar PhD student’s microneedle technology wins award

Ellen Cahill, a UCD PhD student from Castlebar, has won a Commercialisation Award from University College Dublin (UCD) for developing a new microneedle technology.
Microneedle patches are microsystem devices which are commonly used to painlessly pierce an individual’s skin creating a pathway for therapeutic drug delivery. Many such needles have been designed for use in vaccine and therapeutic drug delivery.
Ellen’s tech start-up Micro Needle Slow-Mo has designed and developed a new type of microneedle for delivering slow-release therapeutics with enhanced mechanical performance compared to currently available microneedles on the market.
Micro Needle Slow-Mo was the overall winner of the 2016 UCD MedTech Innovation Sprint Programme, a one-day initiative designed and delivered by UCD’s technology transfer and enterprise development teams at NovaUCD.
Each one-day innovation sprint programme aims to encourage the development of commercial outputs, arising from specific research areas, by engaging with researchers at an earlier stage in the commercialisation process.
Commenting on the win, Ellen said she was ‘delighted’. “During the programme I received valuable feedback for my business idea from a perspective beyond an academic viewpoint. I now aim to seek Enterprise Ireland commercialisation funding to help bring this technology to the next stage of development.”
This research has been supported by Science Foundation Ireland through a Technology Innovation Development Award, the Naughton Foundation and a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie fellowship.