The device that Steven Staal and Arjan Floris have developed to gauge the amount of a drug in the bloodstream isn’t much bigger than an average mobile phone. No more phials of blood or waiting time in labs: the ‘lab-on-a-chip’ only needs a drop of blood to see whether the dosage needs to be adjusted. These new graduates in electrical engineering decided to set up their own company to turn their idea into a successful product.

Their company is called Medimate and they are certainly not short of ambition: “We want to become market leaders in point of care diagnostics. This implies that patients can do their own tests at home to see how much of a drug is in their blood, for example.” It will be as simple as the do-it-yourself blood sugar tests that we are all familiar with. No matter how ‘high-tech’ this is, it must be manufactured as cheaply as possible because it’s actually no more than a disposable chip. The initial prototypes cost hundreds of euros, but the final cost needs to drop to around one euro each.