Under the radar: tackling the forgotten disease in our midst

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I am Emma Hayhurst, co-founder and CEO of Llusern Scientific. Llusern's purpose is to address inequalities in healthcare by overcoming barriers to accurate diagnostics -- giving everyone the chance to be diagnosed properly when they need to be. We have developed a novel molecular diagnostic testing device which can be used for the diagnosis of Covid-19\. I would like to use this Innovation award to help us develop a new test for the diagnosis of urinary tract infections (UTIs). UTIs are the most common infection globally. Risk of suffering from UTI increases with age -- and more than 90% of sufferers are women. Anyone who has suffered from a UTI (and over 50% of women will have done) can tell you that even an 'uncomplicated' UTI can cause severe pain and discomfort but UTIs can also be fatal if not properly diagnosed and treated -- over 5,000 people die from a UTI every year in England and Wales.Because UTI diagnosis has been overlooked for so long, treatments are often given on the basis of vague or inaccurate diagnostic tools and this means that many of the millions and millions of antibiotics prescribed to treat UTIs are unnecessary or inappropriate. This contributes to the spread of antibiotic resistance.Our test would help solve this issue by telling the GP whether someone has a UTI and what bacteria is causing that UTI, thus allowing better treatment decisions to be made. Our UTI test is portable, quick (30 mins from sample to result), affordable and easy to use -- no sample processing is required and users would need less than one hour's training to be able to carry out a diagnostic test.This project would allow Llusern to evaluate our UTI test on a large number of real clinical samples, as well as testing the market to work out exactly where there is most need for our product and securing more funding to bring our UTI product to market. Our UTI test has the potential to be transformative for UTI diagnosis -- reducing the associated illnesses and deaths and resulting in more tailored, appropriate antibiotic prescriptions. It's time to stop ignoring this disease of women and the elderly - relying on slow or inaccurate diagnostic tools is no longer acceptable.