SenSwiss

We are a team of 8 motivated Master’s students studying Microengineering, Bioengineering and Life Sciences, representing the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. The interdisciplinary nature of the SensUs competition brought us together, and we are looking forward to learning from each other.

The theme of this year’s project, antibiotics, resonated with our team members, since it is currently such a hot topic. Due to the emergence of resistant strains of bacteria, the requirement to treat patients with increasingly strong, but often potentially harmful antibiotics, has motivated the development of tools to monitor them precisely. These antibiotics may be equally risky to the patient as they are necessary; we want to leave nothing to chance! We therefore aim to develop a reliable, fast and inexpensive point-of-care biosensor for vancomycin, the antibiotic SensUs chose for us this year. We are really excited to tackle a real-world problem and apply the knowledge gained from our different backgrounds, learning many things along the way. After spending several months brainstorming ideas for our device, we’re thrilled to say that we finally turned our concept into a reality!