Recent advances have enabled early detection of cancers with just a blood sample, but this can still take 2 weeks. Cancer diagnoses using scans and tissue biopsy are slow, expensive and risky for patients. With the advancement of liquid biopsy, patients can be screened or diagnosed with just a blood sample, but this technique is still slow and expensive as it relies on PCR and sequencing.

Our nanorobots are added to blood samples. When they capture a cancer biomarker they light up, allowing point-of-care testing. As there is no need for high capital expenditure, our nanorobots are 10 times cheaper. The whole process is also more than 100 times faster – a matter of one or two hours rather than weeks – as there is no need for complex lab protocols which require bioinformaticians to analyse the data.