Sensa Bues won Venture Cup for its unique drug tester

The Swedish medical technology company Sensa Bues won the Venture Cup competition for innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to its unique and revolutionary drug tester. Sensa Bues’ new drug tester can measure for drugs in the air breathed by test subjects in a simple, quick, portable, non-intrusive and – above all else - 100 per cent reliable manner – something that does not currently exist on the world market.

Sensa Bues won the annual Swedish nationwide Venture Cup business plan competition for 2011, and accepted the first prize (200,000 SEK as well as individual coaching from a McKinsey team for three weeks) on Thursday evening having prevailed over 12 other finalists. Venture Cup was started in 1998 and has since grown to be the largest competition of its kind in the world.

Sensa Bues won the first prize for its new technology which enables the direct measurement of both the amount of addiction drugs, and the type of drugs, that exist in the air exhaled by persons being tested, and which provides a quick and 100 per cent reliable measurement result. No such technology has previously been available in the world. The technology is based on the research of Olof Beck, adjunct professor in analytical toxicology and pharmacology, and his research group at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden.

Sensa Bues’ new method can discover addiction drugs such as amphetamine, methamphetamine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and methadone via a simple breath test. The method is very cost-effective when compared with today’s urine and blood tests, since there is no need for time-consuming supervised urination or for trained medical personnel to be present to perform blood tests.

Police officers should be able to administer these tests at the side of the road just as easily as they currently administer alcohol tests, and the tests provide a reliable measurement result. The portable product will be available on the market during the late summer of 2011.

The global market for drug testers is growing by an average of 4.6 per cent annually, and it is expected to be worth almost 17 billion SEK by 2014. Around 300,000 drug tests are taken in Europe and North America every day. Most experts believe, and international statistics indicate, that drugs represent a much larger problem and are the cause of more traffic accidents than alcohol-related incidents. In total it is estimated that five per cent of the world’s population between the ages of 15 and 64 – that is over 200 million people – use illegal drugs in some form. 

– Traditional drug tests are complicated and intrusive. Now, instead, a couple of breaths can reveal the drug user with a totally reliable technology that provides results that hold up in judicial proceedings, says Bo Hammarlund, CEO at Sensa Bues.

– Police officers throughout the entire world, judicial bodies, healthcare providers and many private industry sectors have for decades struggled with the problem of how to quickly and easily test people for drugs who are, for example, suspected of having driven a vehicle while under the influence of drugs, or how to test employees within sectors such as the transport industry. There are medical, ethical and judicial problems associated with the old tests. Our new product solves these problems, and it is also much cheaper. We see an enormous global potential for the product.

Professor Olof Beck and his research group at Karolinska Institutet have tested the method on addiction patients under scientific conditions. The correlation between the result provided from measuring for drugs in a person’s exhaled breath compared with urine and blood samples is 100 per cent in the study that has been published in the ”Journal of Analytical Chemistry” in June, 2010.

– We believe that the breath tests will revolutionise the market for drug testing at workplaces. Earlier attempts with saliva and sweat tests have proven to involve expensive methods that provide unreliable results, nor are they recommended by the Swedish National Board for workplace testing. If the results for breath tests continue to maintain their current promise, we believe that they will eventually take over from urine testing as the new "golden standard". We think that the future is looking extremely exciting!, says Rolf Niemi, CEO at Nordisk Drog Prevention AB (“Scandinavian Drug Prevention Ltd”).

For additional information please contact:

Bo Hammarlund

Founder and CEO, Sensa Bues

Telephone: +46 70-741 26 22

E-mail: bo.hammarlund@sensabues.com

Web: www.sensabues.com

About Sensa Bues:

Sensa Bues is a Swedish technical testing and analysis company that manufactures systems for the detection of gases, and that develops methods and equipment in order to be able to offer the "detection of addiction drugs" service. In the summer of 2011, Sensa Bues launched a unique drug tester which measures for drugs in the exhaled breath of the person being tested. The company was founded in 2009 by Bo Hammarlund, Jacques Raaijmakers and Professor Olof Beck.