A link-up between a North Wales engineering company and Swansea University could lead to swifter diagnosis of diseases such as breast cancer.
The collaboration, between Porvair Filtration Group in Wrexham and the Centre for Nanohealth (CNH) at Swansea University, comes under the umbrella of XGEN, the Assembly-backed consortium of advanced manufacturing companies.
The Wrexham plant turns out thousands of inert porous polyethylene discs, which are used as specialised components in analytical equipment, essentially to trap powders as solutions flow through them.
Porvair believes that the discs could have significant applications in the pharmaceutical industry - but lacks the expertise to carry out the necessary biochemical research.
This is now being conducted by CNH, which is working on ways of speeding up the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as breast cancer in non-hospital environments such as the home, community clinics and local GP surgeries.
'We are trying to identify how our plastic material can be used in diagnostics and drug development,' said Dr David Cowieson, Porvair's product development manager.
'Test devices based on it have been easy to control, with clear results, and therefore the material lends itself to the sort of research being conducted in Swansea,' he added.
'They have the necessary biological and healthcare knowledge, and have access to human and animal cell cultures,' he said.
CNH is a partner in the Welsh Assembly's XGEN initiative, which brings together advanced manufacturing companies in Wales to develop next-generation products.
