Planet Innovation and Lumos Diagnostics have won two awards at the 2020 Good Design Awards, including a Good Design Award Gold accolade for Lumos’s Leelu Reader.
The annual Good Design Awards is Australia’s oldest and most prestigious international awards for design and innovation. This year’s awards attracted a record 835 design submissions.
The Leelu Reader and associated analysis software won a Good Design Award Gold and a Good Design Award in the Engineering Design, and Medical and Scientific Product Design categories.
The Leelu Reader is a compact, configurable lateral-flow medical instrument used in the development of rapid diagnostic tests capable of detecting infectious diseases in clinics, GP offices or at home. It dramatically reduces the time, cost and risk for companies to develop, validate and transfer to manufacture highly sensitive rapid point-of-care tests.
More than 55 Good Design Awards jurors evaluated each entry according to a strict set of design criteria which covers ‘good design’, ‘design innovation’ and ‘design impact’.
The jury praised the Leelu Reader, commenting: “The designers are commended for their advances in rapid diagnostic testing and their work to miniaturize and scale the availability of diagnostic testing, thereby enhancing availability of this technology to a wider market. This very clever device is well positioned for the current COVID situation, enabling faster tests for infection. It looks brilliantly simple, efficient, and beautifully designed.”
Sam Lanyon, Executive Chairman of Lumos Diagnostics and co-CEO of PI, said he was honored that the Good Design Awards had recognized Leelu’s contribution to the advancement of rapid diagnostic point-of-care testing.
“Rapid diagnostic testing is being adopted globally as an effective frontline diagnostic tool that allows patients to get results in minutes, not days. This rapid result enables immediate action to be taken in potentially isolating the patient and seeking treatment that could ultimately save millions of lives,” Sam said.
“Leelu has been instrumental in the development of diagnostic tests responding to new infectious diseases that emerge globally. It is designed to be readily deployed to scientists in times of medical emergencies, with the versatility to detect a wide range of biomarkers in patient samples for the identification of new diseases. This facilitates the development of new tests and aids efforts in controlling the spread of infectious diseases.”
Lumos Diagnostics was spun out of Planet Innovation in 2017, and has offices in Australia and the U.S.
