Trinity Showcases Leading Edge Advances in Innovation and Technology

Posted on: 05 October 2012

Trinity’s Technology Transfer Office showcased a selection of the latest exciting advances in innovation and technology by TCD researchers at an event this week. Trinity researchers showcased 36 innovative ideas, technologies, products and processes at different stages in the commercial pipeline and derived from a wide range of disciplines across College.

With Trinity’s record of over 27 spin-out companies in the last five years, this showcase was a must-see for business partners, investors and entrepreneurs alike. This year’s projects promise real commercial opportunities, demonstrating the benefits of research to the economy and the community.

Examples of the inventions showcased were: 

Mitral Valve Replacement (MiVaR) Device

Approx 3.5 million Americans have a type of heart valve disease called mitral valve disease.  It is the most common form of the disease and most patients are treated with open heart surgery.  However, up to 400,000 patients are unsuitable for this major surgey.  Trinity College Dublin’s Bruce Murphy and his team in Bioengineering have developed a device which is a self expandable bio-prosthetic valve replacement device that can be positioned across a dysfunctional valve using conventional minimally invasive percutaneous techniques. The MiVaR device basically replaces a patient’s dysfunctional mitral valve.  

Researchers: Bruce Murphy, Jim Crowley, Liam Breen


Personalised Independent Living Opportunities’ (PILO)

Management of a chronic illness requires patients to follow complex treatment regimes and make significant life-style changes. Non-compliance is commonplace, resulting in frequent rehospitalisation.  A need exists for adoption of assistive technologies to support complex disease management regimens at home. Using behavioural based health psychology research into chronic conditions, PILO’s unique multi-media content in mobile and web applications aims to increase patient knowledge, self-efficacy, internal control and quality of life via a tailored self-management home learning service. Prototypes are under development for Stroke and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.  Researchers from nursing and midwifery are leading the initiative.

Researchers: John Dinsmore, Catherine McCabe, Anne-Marie Brady


Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies

Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations and associated global warming issues impose extraordinary challenges to modern industrial societies. A team of scientists in Trinity College Dublin have discovered a series of compounds containing earth-abundant, non-toxic, metal ions that efficiently adsorb and release atmospheric CO2 on demand. The high CO2 affinity of the materials that regenerate during the release process gives rise to ‘green’ and highly cost-effective carbon capture and membrane technologies. The potential market covers large-scale industrial sectors adhering to governmental commitments to control CO2 emissions under international agreements

Researchers: Wolfgang Schmitt, AnneMarie O’Toole


CipherDocs – Secure Cloud Documents

As more and more individuals, SMEs and Enterprises make the leap to cloud computing infrastructure and services, there is a growing need to control who has access to their data. Experience to date has shown that if the securing of the data is overly complex, users will shy away from using the service. Therefore encryption needs to be a transparent process – something that the user does not even have to be aware of.  Trinity College Dublin computer scientists have developed Cipherdocs, which achieves this by making use of unique algorithms, and KeyHub technology that allows for the transparent synchronization and exchange of encryption keys between users in the system

Researchers: Hitesh Tewari, Karl Reid

About Trinity Research & Innovation

* The Technology Transfer Office is part of Trinity Research & Innovation and is the first point of contact for companies seeking to find opportunities to collaborate with leading research groups in Trinity College Dublin. Trinity Research & Innovation promotes and manages the interaction between TCD researchers, funding agencies and industry. It is also responsible for managing TCD’s intellectual property, technology transfer and innovation,  commercialisation and entrepreneurship.