2018 has been an exciting year for TRUEinvivo. We raised our first £300k investment in January/February mainly to build our prototype fast bead reader and to develop some new concepts especially for 2D and 3D in-body measurements. We introduced our DOSEmapper™ concept at the European industry radiotherapy and oncology (ESTRO) conference/exhibition in Barcelona in April and at the World Medical Physics Congress in Prague in May, both with amazingly good responses both from hospitals (potential customers) and industrial companies (potential partners and distributors) alike. The prototype reader was completed in November and exhibited at a couple of investor events to much interest. We also filed a new patent application for the 2D and 3D concepts.

We have recently contracted the design and build of the pre-production version of our reader to be ready in 2019 in time for regulatory approval in late summer.  In parallel we are developing the DOSEmapper™ prototype itself. These are expensive activities so we have started our next raise of £500k to achieve the important regulatory milestone which means we can sell into hospitals. We have three partner hospitals already and five more approached us so we have a pipeline!

But our market is wider than radiotherapy hospitals. In May we won an award for “the most relevant new technology in nuclear decommissioning” with specific interest from two leading organisations in that industry. In the summer we received two more serious leads in the animal health market followed in the autumn by interest from the defence and aerospace sectors – all without us marketing to them. It seems that with DOSEmapper™ we do have a new and innovative product that, in those markets, does not need medical regulatory approval.

Finally we won two other awards in 2018. We won the Surrey Business Award for the Business Innovation of the Year and, just before Christmas, we won the Innovate Guildford Award for Innovation in Human Healthcare.

It sounds a lot about us but, of course, it is always a wider team effort and I want to thank all our staff, our Board, our advisors, our investors, our partner hospitals, our suppliers and our supporters, friends and families for your help, guidance and sheer patience in keeping us on this journey. Thank you for sharing in our passion to help clinicians to make radiotherapy safer and more effective for millions of people worldwide.

2018 was an exciting year but 2019 promises to be even busier as we move to launch our products before the end of the next twelve months. I look forward to writing that blog next December.

Happy New Year to you all.

Nigel Biggs, CEO