Preventing Illness

Christofer Toumazou at age 23, was accepted for a postdoctoral position in the university, beginning a career from there which would see him create a combined digital and analogue mobile phone, an artificial pancreas for type one diabetics and a wireless heart monitor, among other inventions.

It is his latest creation (above), however, which has sparked the most interest and last month earned him a European inventor award. Using a small silicon microchip in a USB, a 'lab on a chip' as it has been coined, DNA data can be analyzed within minutes and outside a laboratory.

The new technology is aimed at identifying predispositions for hereditary diseases like diabetes and prescribing the exact right dosage for medications, cutting down on the cost of current DNA testing machines.

"My dream was to have a handheld consumer device with … a little USB stick that could look at rapidly screening for genetic mutations of particular diseases, whether it is a predisposition to type two diabetes [or] whether to a type of breast cancer," said Toumazou in his office in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.

The new DNA analysis method is the latest installment in a far from traditional career path for the Greek-Cypriot. 

Having left school in Cheltenham at 16 with a "few CSEs", the most typical route for him to follow would have been in the family catering business until he became inspired by an aunt's husband who was an engineer and from there developed an interest in electrical engineering.

Encouraged to do a one year radio and electronics certificate – when the "whole Greek Cypriot contingent of Cheltenham turned up" on his first day – he says he found the environment in which he wanted to thrive and went on to a two year general engineering course, a degree at the then Oxford polytechnic and later a PhD. By 23, he had applied for a postdoctoral position at Imperial College and was offered it the same day.

The position involved working with industry to reduce the size of a satellite phone at a time when his interest was in analogue – speech, sound and vision – electronics. 

Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai prime minister who then ran a mobile phone operator, asked him to make a combined digital and analogue mobile phone in the 90s, which led to the establishment of Toumaz Technology, a commercial spin-off.