ETH: Triple victory for spin-outs

All three winners of this year’s Swiss Technology Award for Innovation are spin-outs from ETH Zurich.

The company HeiQ Material is the winner in the category “Maturity Stage”, which is aimed at companies that already have products on the market and a customer base and have the ability to take ground-breaking technologies through to market. In the case of HeiQ material, this was a new impregnation technology for non-woven textiles that absorb oil in large quantities whilst at the same time rejecting water.

The product, OilGuard, was developed in record time, for use in beach and coastal protection in the case of oil spills, in collaboration with two partner companies. OilGuard-woven mats are up to 5.5 metres wide and 30 metres long and can absorb and retain six times their own weight in oil.

Meanwhile, Malcisbo was winner in the “Seed” category of the Swiss Technology Award, for its work developing a new generation of vaccines that are based on sugars. Initially, the company wants to bring a vaccine for protecting chickens against the bacterium Campylobacter to market.

This year 400 million people worldwide were infected with the bacterium, which causes gastrointestinal disease, as a result of eating infected chickens.

Malcisbo’s vaccine is water soluble and can be mixed into the birds’ drinking water, making it easy to administer. In addition, each dose is so cheap that it will have a minimal effect on the price of chicken meat.

The third ETH winner was Optotune, in the “Start-up” category. The company is developing a new optical technology based on polymers that can be shaped by applying an electrical voltage. This allows multi-functional optical systems to be built, for use in both the endoscopy and microscopy, as well as in the range of camera lenses.

Currently Optotune is focussing on the mobile phone market, where it has developed a triple zoom lens the size of a sugar cube. The first mobile phones with the lens on board will hit the market in 2011.

The Swiss Technology Award was set up in 1987 to promote innovation in Switzerland.