Masters: Haemolysis Testing – Vital for Innovation

Pre-clinical haemolysis testing helps in identifying and mitigating risks, ensuring the device is safe for human use before clinical trials.

Pre-clinical haemolysis testing is crucial for cardiovascular devices to ensure safety and efficacy. It evaluates the device’s impact on red blood cells, preventing potential complications like anemia or thrombosis.

Cardiovascular medtech sector is expected to reach a valuation of $9.93 billion by the year 2025. With an exponential growth of this sector, there is a dire need of more haemolysis testing facilities that can provide critical data to refine designs, enhancing patient safety and facilitating regulatory approvals, ultimately accelerating the development of effective medical devices.

Furthermore, animal haemolysis profiles differ from human profiles due to species-specific variations in blood cell properties and circulatory dynamics. These differences can affect the assessment of device safety and efficacy.

Understanding these discrepancies is essential to accurately translate pre-clinical findings to human applications, ensuring reliable and safe medical device performance. Hence, there is an unmet need to develop a robust and standardised haemolysis testing facility that can effectively determine the haemolysis profile of static and dynamic cardiovascular devices.

The overall objective of this proposal is to develop a robust haemolysis testing rig to test various cardiovascular devices, and study the effect of the difference in haemolysis profile of animal vs human on the tested device.

Tenure: Two years

Start date: 1 August 2025

Specification

Minimum requirements

  • 2.1 honours degree in mechanical/biomedical engineering/medical physics.
  • A high level of competence in the English language in one of the examination systems recognised by RCSI.

Desirable candidate specifications

  • Experience in developing benchtop in-vitro testbeds/rigs especially in cardiovascular area.

Application process

Please apply for the research project through the link below.

Applications must include:

Apply now

Application deadline: 30 April 2025

Shortlisting: 6 May 2025

Interviews: 12 May 2025

Please note

  • It is the candidate’s responsibility to ensure the application form is completed in full and on time – late and/or incomplete applications will not normally be assessed.
  • Unfortunately, we are unable to provide individual feedback to applicants.
  • Shortlisted candidates will be invited for interview (applicants may attend a virtual interview, although in-person is preferred)
  • At this stage only successful candidates will be contacted to submit, CV, transcripts and other relevant documentation.
  • Only their referees will also be contacted at this stage for a reference.
  • Only the tuition fee is supported for the project (student stipends are not supported).