UK company receives recognition for making confocal microscopy "personal"

Aurox Limited, a leader in the design and manufacture of innovative optical imaging equipment, has won a 2012 Queen's Award for Enterprise in Innovation.

The award comes in recognition of the development and successful market introduction of the SD62 microscope, one of an ever increasing portfolio of Aurox products.

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 revolutionary design brought affordable confocal microscopy to a wider user community. The unit - barely the size of a data projector - attaches to any conventional microscope and enables high quality 3D images to be acquired in real time. This makes it possible to capture the response of living cells to stimuli which is a cornerstone of biomedical research and drug development. The SD62 does this by using a completely new and patented 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 in a straightforward manner, both an optically sectioned image and an image equivalent to that obtained by a conventional wide-field fluorescence microscope.

Professor Tony Wilson, a Director of Aurox said, "The technological and commercial significance of the design, and the quality of manufacturing is underlined by the SD62 being distributed as an Aurox product by Carl Zeiss, one of the world's leading microscope companies, and Andor Technology plc, a world leader in scientific optical imaging."

Aurox is building on its success and has developed a core imaging technology that lies at the heart of a new range of products that address market needs in applications ranging from materials inspection to high throughput screening.

The Queen's Awards are the UK's highest accolade for business success. They 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.

For more information visit www.aurox.co.uk