TECH OFFERS

As climate change continues to cause rising temperatures and unpredictable droughts, the resulting environmental degradation and poor soil conditions have negative impacts on plant health and nutrition, ultimately affecting crop harvests and the global food chain. In Singapore, these changes threaten the very heart of the city's reputation as a garden city, including greenery, carbon sequestration, and aesthetically pleasing landscapes. To combat these issues and improve greening outcomes and land yield, enhancing soil conditions and plant resilience is crucial. One significant issue that needs addressing is soil water repellence, which prevents water from penetrating the soil, leading to rapid evaporation and reduced plant growth. This problem becomes more severe on sloping terrains like mounds and hillsides, where water is more likely to run off causing additional issues like soil compaction and disease. Soil water repellency also affects the hydrological and geomorphological properties of soil, leading to reduced infiltration capacity, accelerated soil erosion, uneven wetting patterns, development of preferential flow, and the accelerated leaching of agrichemicals. This technology refers to a specifically engineered nanogel formulation that controls water retention and release in dry soils. The nanogel formulation can uptake water-soluble nutrients and release them when needed. It has the potential to not only improve reclaimed land but also convert dry land into productive land that supports crop cultivation. The nanogel formulation can be tuned with varying retention capabilities based on underlying soil conditions and has been extensively tested in different plant species. The technology provider is currently looking for test-bedding partners from the agricultural industry and interested environmental NGOs.  

Effective wound care requires a multi-modal approach, including wound bed optimization, management of medical conditions, and consistent follow up. Wound care products play a key role in effective wound healing. Currently, most of the commercially available dressings are intended to maintain a dry wound environment or manage infection. Biomedical innovations aimed at improving rates of healing include the use of active biologics or animal-derived collagen. However, these strategies have high infection risks, scarring potential and are too costly for long term use. This technology has incorporated biomolecules that promote skin regeneration into synthetically fabricated polymer filament to develop a bioactive wound care product used to enhance wound healing, reduce inflammation and scarring potential. Through a patented methodology of blending polymers, Polyethylene (PE) or poly (lactic co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) with biomolecule copolymer additives such as oligopeptides derived from collagen, laminin, or oligosaccharides from Hyaluronic Acid (HA), these polymers are made bioactive to be used to coat existing wound dressings such as non–woven gauze, foam dressings or fabricated into dermal matrices for burn care and deep wound management. The bioactive polymer can be produced via conventional methods such as dip coating or 3D Printing. Depending on the type of wounds (exudative, dry, partial thickness, full thickness or highly inflamed), the right type of dressing can be applied through a selection of basic carrier (gauze, foam, matrix) followed by the active layer required. The technology owner is seeking out-licensing, R&D and clinical collaborations with wound care and medical device companies.  

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a highly targeted treatment modality activated through light-based photooxidation process where a photosensitizer (PS) molecule upon illumination by visible or near infrared light, produces Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) that invokes cellular death. This technology surfaced two newly discovered synthetically modified Eosin Y analogue compounds, E3B and E5B as organic PS for targeting Gram-positive bacteria, in particular Methicillin-Resistant Staphyloccocus aureus (MRSA), without non-specific killing of normal mammalian cells. Microbial infectious diseases caused by multidrug resistant pathogens are a constant severe threat to global public health. PDT is a form of antibiotic-free phototherapy to efficaciously treat microbial infections with advantages in spatiotemporal controllability, non-invasiveness, minimal off-targets and side effects, and broad antimicrobial spectrum. However, the promise of PDT in antibacterial intervention has not been fully fulfilled particularly using conventional organic PS due to restricted structural availability. Herein, we disclosed organic PS compounds, E3B and E5B, with high intracellular ROS-generation capabilities under white light irradiation at very low light dose without suffering photobleaching of traditional PSs to combat antimicrobial resistance as a promising antibacterial PDT for translation to clinical trials. The technology owner is seeking collaboration with biotech, clinical stage biotech and pharmaceutical companies to develop and commercialize new antimicrobial PDT agents superior to currently marketed organic PSs. The technology has been validated till in vivo specificity and stability studies. There are opportunities in R&D collaboration to demonstrate the interactions and characterization of the novel E3B and E5B PS with metabolites in controlled functional assays of microbial communities.

In manufacturing there are many instances where there is a need for low production runs of parts. These could be for parts of an equipment, tools, small volume runs for trials or customised parts. However, traditional manufacturing techniques are usually not cost-effective for such low volume runs, while current additive manufacturing suffers from low strength, long print times and poor surface finish needing post-processing. Additionally, for techniques using powder and filaments, considerations have to be given to the storage due to oxidation, degradation, flammability and toxicity of these precursor materials. The tech owner has developed a hybrid manufacturing technique that involves both additive and subtractive manufacturing methods. Instead of powder or filaments, sheets and foils are used as precursor materials, thereby alleviating cost, safety and performance concerns that were outlined. A laser is used to cut and fuse the different layers of the build.   Numerous tests conducted by the team have consistently yielded parts that are dense and displayed high strength. The system is able to work with different materials, including highly reflective ones such as, aluminium, copper. Parts using carbon fibres, composition materials, ceramics, etc have also been successfully printed. Based on initial estimates, this technique offers up to 80% cost advantage over powder bed systems. The tech owner is seeking partners to collaborate in test bedding the system for manufacturing of complex, customized and/or high strength / high thermal conductivity parts for applications in the healthcare, semiconductor, aerospace, automotive, telecoms or marine & offshore sectors.

In radiotherapy for patients with gastrointestinal (GI) cancer, real-time, continuous monitoring of X-ray radiation in the GI track can greatly improve the precision of the treatment. This proposed technology consists of a swallowable X-ray dosimeter capsule for real-time monitoring of absolute absorbed radiation dose and changes in pH and temperature in the GI tract. Using a neural network-based regression model and a luminescence of nanoscintillators fiber, the capsule is able to estimate radiation dose from radioluminescence and afterglow intensity and temperature. Initial preclinical study in a rabbit model showed that the dosimeter was approximately five times more accurate than standard methods for dose determination. Hence, these swallowable dosimeters may help to improve radiotherapy and understand how radiotherapy affects tumour pH and temperature. The technology owner is seeking for collaborations and out-licensing with medical institutions and medical device companies for clinical testing and further research identifying the capsule's position and posture after ingestion, developing a robust positioning system.

Thermal management is an essential part of the design of high power density electronics. As the power density of electronic devices increases, so does the amount of heat they generate, and this heat must be dissipated effectively to prevent the devices from overheating and failing. This technology offers a method to produce high thermal conductivity boron nitride (BN) composites that aim to improve thermal management in high power density electronics, leading to more efficient, more compact, and safer electronic systems. BN composites are a group of materials made by combining boron nitride with another material, such as a polymer, metal, or ceramic. A key advantage of such composites is that they exhibit higher thermal conductivity than any commercially available material that is electrically insulating. The resultant BN composites are also low in weight, easily shaped, exhibit good mechanical properties, and offer the unique capability of designing the path by which the heat will be conducted. These properties fulfil the demanding requirements for electronic packaging in emerging markets like Internet of Things and embedded systems, autonomous vehicles, high speed computers, satellites to name a few. The technology owner is seeking for co-development and out-licensing opportunities with semiconductor and device-assembling companies that require high thermal conductivity materials.

Recent advances in soft robotics revolutionize the way robots interact with the environment, empowering robots to undertake complex tasks using soft and compliant grippers. Compared to traditional rigid structures. Soft grippers have excellent adaptability for a variety of objects and tasks. However, the existing gripper systems faces some challenges, such as handling delicate, wet, and slippery items, the risk of damaging valuable items, and high production cost. Based on pneumatic jamming of 3D-printed fabrics, the technology owner has developed a variable-stiffness soft pneumatic gripper that can apply small forces for pinching and pick-up heavy objects via stiffening. The invented grippers are soft and adaptive to handle delicate items with various shapes and weights, minimising the damaging risk of items during the gripping process. In addition, such gripper with adjustable stiffness could handle heavy and bulky items by increasing its gripping strength. These benefits make the gripper more versatile and adaptable to various applications in agriculture, food processing, packaging, manufacturing, and human-robot interaction (HRI). The technology owner is seeking to do R&D collaboration, IP licensing, and test-bedding with industrial partners intending to integrate variable-stiffness gripper in their applications. 

A microfluidic chip-based mechanism has been developed as a Point-of-Care Testing (POCT) device to replace Lateral Flow Assays (LFA) for fast and convenient blood analysis. The microchip system utilises the principle of immunoassays but with high accuracy and compatibility to different signalling tags, providing a quantitative readout. Conventional immunoassays involve multistep procedure and long process time. While LFAs are fast and convenient, they are qualitative. The device demonstrated a one-step assay that can achieve equal or higher sensitivities than standard methods within significantly shorter total processing time. In a microfluidic device, the sample flows in precisely defined microchannels, which allow better control of fluid behaviour and higher consistency in testing results compared to LFA in which the sample flows by wicking through the porous paper-based material. This technology resides in the assembly of components and materials to immobilise antibodies or antigens onto the chip which can be easily scaled for commercial production. The technology owner is seeking collaborations with manufacturers of IVD devices or Medtech companies to out-license the technology and expand the range of antibodies targets for the microchip.

The technology consists in a new type of neural networks, providing explainable, verifiable, compact and private AI solutions. Explainability: the technology provides precise global explanations and the exact rules learned by the AI model, even with large datasets. We transform clients' raw data and/or models into meaningful results through high-quality visual analytics, empowering them to enhance the model based on these explanations. Formal Verification: the technology allows the client to formally verify certain properties of the model, such as its robustness to adversarial attacks, its fairness according to certain features, etc.