Inventor awarded

A handheld medical diagnostic system with the potential to save millions of lives has won INNOVIC's International Next Big Thing Award.

Victorian inventor Micah Atkin conceived the idea as a way to deliver a low-cost testing system to enable anyone to perform laboratory-quality tests quickly and easily.

The first use for the handheld system will be to test for tuberculosis, a disease which kills over 2 million people a year and is the leading cause of infectious disease deaths.

Tuberculosis is readily curable through accurate diagnosis and the use of low-cost drugs, yet the most badly infected countries cannot afford the highly specialised and very expensive equipment and personnel needed for testing.

The Innovation Excellence category winner was a Gigabit Wireless Transceiver on CMS - a high-speed, low-cost chip that facilitates short-range multigigabit transfer of data, wirelessly, created by Victorian inventor Professor Stan Skafidis.