After losing his wife, Cambridge entrepreneur is determined his breath test device will make a difference.
Billy Boyle is a man on a mission, and that mission is to save 100,000 people from dying of cancer by getting an early-stage breath test developed by the firm he founded and runs, Owlstone Medical, into widespread use as fast as possible.
Owlstone started life in 2004 as a developer of military applications. Spun out of the University of Cambridge – Billy got a masters at the Department of Engineering – Owlstone’s breath testtechnology is a miniature chemical sensor sited on a silicon chip, and works using the firm’s patented Field Asymmetric Ion Mobility Spectrometry (FAIMS) technology, a mature technology for gas phase ion separation.
“We won a lot of funding from the Ministry of Defence to mature the technology,” Billy told the Cambridge Independent. “Once you have that then it’s a question of how you deploy it in medical applications.”
FAIMS is able to diagnose cancers and can be adapted to test for inflammatory and infectious diseases. Billy has netted $23.5million in investment to date, but the medical arm of the firm was spun out from Owlstone Inc in March last year. Owlstone Medical’s trajectory was also influenced by a personal tragedy: in October 2012, Billy’s wife Kate – the mother of their twin sons and an adviser to Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – was diagnosed with colon cancer.
“Our main development at this stage is looking for the output of the clinical trials – that’s what we’re focused on for the next year, and efforts with wider clinical research companies and with our pharmaceutical partners. We’ll be announcing those partners in six to nine months time but the main one is 4D pharma PLC (LON:DDDD).”
