Optical imaging equipment manufacturer Aurox has won a 2012 Queen’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation for its SD62 unit. The device, barely the size of a data projector, attaches to any conventional microscope and enables 3D images to be acquired in real time. This makes it possible to capture the response of living cells to stimuli, a cornerstone of biomedical research and drug development.
The SD62 operates by using a technical approach based on structured illumination and aperture correlation. It encodes the excitation light in two complementary ways and then extracts by post processing the acquired images, both an optically sectioned image and an image equivalent to that obtained by a conventional wide-field fluorescence microscope.
Dr Rimas Juskaitis, Aurox managing director, said: ‘The Queen’s Award, coming soon after winning an R&D100 award, is a welcome endorsement. These awards provide much-deserved recognition of the efforts of the team that developed the SD62 and who successfully took it to market.’
The Queen’s Awards are made each year by The Queen, on the advice of the Prime Minister, who is assisted by an advisory committee that includes representatives of government, industry and commerce, and the trade unions.
