The good of small things

 

Not so long ago, ex-technology start-up chief executives, Andrew Monk and Richard Williams, were sat in a pub wondering what to do next. Each had recently left France-based photonic microcell developer, GLOphotonics, and wanted a new challenge. 

 

Monk was mentoring staff on how to kick-start a start-up while Williams was providing consultancy on how to develop and commercialise technology. And that’s when Williams realised that the microscopy market had a gap.

 

“Richard wanted a decent quality microscope that didn’t cost the Earth and he could also travel with,” says Monk. “Great handheld USB digital microscopes were around, but these didn’t have the necessary image quality and you had to travel with a laptop and a rucksack full of equipment, such as a stand and bottom illuminator, so these devices just weren’t that portable either.” 

 

So, with this in mind, Monk and Williams set out to design and manufacture a laboratory-grade microscope that would easily fit into your pocket. Come 2014, they had established UK start-up, ioLight, filed a patent application for their novel digital portable microscope, and were soon to raise a mighty £400,000 in seed and crowd funds.

 

 

Their first product – a X400 portable microscope with 1 mm field of view and 1 micron resolution – was launched in July 2016, and sold more than thirty units, raising £20,000, within that year.

 

Fast-forward to today, and ioLight has delivered a further microscope design with 2 mm FOV as well as inverted and fluorescence versions, and has sold some 250 instruments.

 

As Monk puts it: “We had a bit of a slow start but we’ve sold three times more microscopes than we did, this time last year, and it feels like we’re now really taking off.”

 

The ioLight microscope is not like anything you’ve ever seen. Chiefly comprising a solid, wide stage, that provides a stable optical platform, the instrument also has a sensor unit with adjustable height that contains the lens, illuminator and integrated camera for stills and video.

 

The stage also houses a second illuminator as well as the battery, microprocessor and Wi-Fi chip. 

 

Each microscope’s low centre of gravity and stability are critical for high-resolution imaging, without additional stands, and importantly, its arm also folds into the stage, to form a flat portable unit. 

 

“A key inventive step was getting the microscope to fold so the camera is co-planar with the stage,” highlights Monk. “If something folds it isn’t always stable and we’ve seen many folding microscopes that don’t always work well, so we had to break some ba­sic engineering rules to make a hinge that could allow the instrument to fold and still have one micron resolution.” 

 

 

The optical system – namely the camera and lens – uses high quality, but cheap, mobile phone parts. 

 

As Monk puts it: “There are billions of phones on the market so we wanted reconfigure these parts for the optical system.”

 

The eyepiece of the microscope is replaced by the screen of a tablet or mobile phone. And an app connects the mobile device to the microscope, and no WiFi infrastructure is required so the microscope works in remote locations. 

 

“Apart from the optical system which is less than 0.5% of the costs, everything else is made in the UK,” says Monk. “And we are very proud of this.” 

 

A user’s choice of ioLight microscope depends on the application. The original 1mm FOV version was designed to observe plant and animal samples at the cellular level, and can even display structures in blood cells. 

 

 

Researchers have already used this microscope in Kazakhstan, the Amazon, across Africa and Mount Everest as well as Antarctica. And Monk is hopeful that it will eventually be adopted to recognise malaria parasites in blood smears. 

 

“Our technology has the potential to do this, but we will need to first design our own lens to reach a resolution of perhaps 0.7 micron,” he says. “This will be more expensive but we will get there, and it could change the world.” 

 

Meanwhile the 2 mm FOV instrument targets cell counting, opaque subjects and subjects larger than 1mm. “One of our biggest markets so far has been veterinary science so with its 2 mm field of view, this is suitable for vets that need to count worm eggs,” says Monk. 

 

Similarly, aquaculture is a growing field for ioLight, with both the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and the Fish Vet Group having tested the ioLight microscope and used it to count the numbers of, say, plankton in water samples.

 

“These microscopes can also be used to take scrapes from the gills of fish to check for parasites, such as the dangerous Gyrodactylus Salaris, within 20 minutes,” says Monk. 

 

 

The ioLight Founder and Director is also excited about his company’s more recent inverted and fluorescence instruments.

 

He reckons the inverted microscope, which can be used inside an incubator, will showcase exactly what the portable microscopes can do to more and more researchers.

 

Meanwhile, he is also confident that his company’s low-cost fluorescence microscope will demonstrate that you don’t need an expensive instrument to perform fluorescence microscopy. 

 

“As a company, we’re getting really close to the stage that we will not need to rely on external funding,” says Monk. “Next year we expect to be profitable, and once we’re there, we are going to get our ideas into lots and lots of places.”