VFD Inventor Wins Ig Nobel Prize

Lead developer and inventor of the Vortex Fluidic Device, Prof. Colin Raston was recently honoured with the award of an Ig Noble prize, which recognise achievements that make people laugh and then think. The prize was awarded for Colin's work on unboiling an egg with the VFD, acknowledging the potential of this advance to spur people's interest in science and technology.

A big congratulations to Prof. Raston on this achievement and a big thank you for his tireless efforts to help make Vortex Fluidic Technologies a success. Additional information and coverage of winning the Ig Nobel prize can be found at this Flinders University Press Release.

Vortex Fluidic Technologies Launches

Flinders Partners, the commercial arm for Flinders University, launched Vortex Fluidic Technologies today to help commercialise the Vortex Fluidic Device (VFD) developed by Professor Colin Raston and his team. Vortex Fluidic Technologies will be initially based in the brand new, state-of-the-art Flinders@Tonsley building pictured above, and will seek to complete a limited first production run of VFDs for sale to research customers and industrial clients around the world. 

Based on this initial success Vortex Fluidic Technologies will seek a capital raising that will be used to expand production and scale-up volume production capabilities. We also hope to partner with customers who have independently developed new and useful applications for their VFD by providing additional development and commercialisation support as may be needed to help these applications reach the marketplace. 

VFD Improves Cancer Drug Delivery

Flinders University’s Professor Colin Raston.

Lead Vortex Fluidic Device (VFD) researchers at Flinders University led by Professor Colin Raston have successfully demonstrated drug delivery applications of the VFD by facilitating a four-fold improvement in loading the cancer drug carboplatin into carrier materials. In the Adelaide Now press release facilitated by Flinders University we learn that loading of the drug increased from 17% normally to 75% with the VFD. 

Such advances demonstrate the ability of the VFD to provide benefits to a wide range of applications, especially in high-value low-volume applications such as drug development in the pharmaceuticals industry. 

VFD Helps UCI Partners Unboil an Egg

Steve Zylius / UC Irvine

Earlier this year lead developers of the Vortex Fluidic Device at Flinders University and their research collaborators at University of California, Irvine (UCI) successfully demonstrated the ability to "unboil an egg" by causing denatured, misfolded proteins to refold into their correct, functional, 3D structure. The UCI press release accompanying the announcement, and the efforts of UCI marketing staff led to the story going viral after being taken up by the media and reshared across numerous popular web and media outlets including Scientific American. 

The primary benefits of this capability are expected to be of interest to the pharmaceuticals industry, primarily for refolding therapeutic proteins and improving the production yield of protein therapeutics. Vortex Fluidic Technology, via its parent Flinders Partners has agreements in place with UCI's Office of Technology Alliances for the commercialisation of this application of the VFD technology with UCI running as commercial lead.