About | CCI Photonics

About CCI Photonics Ltd

CCI Photonics is a UK-based deep-tech medical device company and a spin-out from Lancaster University. We are dedicated to commercialising the world’s first rapid infrared diagnostic platform for the primary care market. Supported by University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay, iiCON, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, LYVA Labs and PxN Ventures, we exist to transition infectious disease diagnostics from slow, centralised laboratories to decentralized, immediate patient care at community Pharmacies and Clinics.

The Problem

We address the critical “72-hour diagnostic gap” that currently forces clinicians to prescribe antibiotics empirically. While Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) are the world’s most common bacterial infection, affecting 150 million worldwide and 7.6 million people in England only, the current gold standard for diagnosis relies on laboratory cultures that take days to return results. Or cheap unreliable dipstick tests.

This delay forces GPs and pharmacists to rely on the “best guess” prescribing or inaccurate dipsticks, leading to high rates of treatment failure. The economic impact of this inefficiency is severe: in the UK alone, UTI-related emergency admissions cost the NHS £604 million annually, with a further £180 million spent treating preventable Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR). There is a desperate, funded demand from healthcare payers to replace the 50-year-old dipstick with a solution that prevents these costly hospital admissions. The use of dip tests caused that approximately 1.8 million patients were administered with wrong antibiotic treatments.

Our Solution

Our solution is InfectiScan, a compact ‘sample-in, result-out’ near to the point of care device engineered for non-expert users in pharmacies and clinics. By replacing the biological process of bacterial culture, which takes days, with the physical analysis of light via infrared spectroscopy, InfectiScan delivers results in just 15 minutes. The device uses proprietary machine learning to identify both the infection and the appropriate antibiotic treatment. Demonstrating over 96% accuracy for biological isolates and over 80% for clinical samples, InfectiScan compares favourably to the 83–93% accuracy range of current dip tests and cultures. This capability enables a precise ‘Test & Treat’ model in a single consultation, effectively eliminating the need for empirical prescribing.

CCI Photonics Solution for UTI health gap

Our Technology

As a Lancaster University spinout, CCI Photonics currently holds an exclusive license to the foundational technology developed during the CEO’s PhD research. This patent (PCT/GB2022/050822) protects the application of machine learning to vibrational spectroscopy data (Infrared and Raman) for the discrimination of infection-causing microbial species. The patent is currently at the PCT stage with filings in key international territories, including Germany, France, the USA, and Mexico.

In addition to this background IP, the company expanded its portfolio in February 2025 by filing UK Patent Application No. GB 2502872.1. This patent protects a novel method utilizing machine learning to analyse biological sample FTIR features, enabling the selection of optimal bandpass optical elements for a cost-effective device architecture. A prior art search confirmed the uniqueness of this approach, with no similar applications cited. A PCT application for this technology is scheduled for submission by March 2026.

InfectiScan was developed thanks to an IUK grant. After its completion, it was then validated at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In this project we confirmed that InfectiScan has a comparable performance against the gold-standard. InfectiScan is in its first iteration and requires significant improvements, mainly on user experience including the sample preparation (IP identified and to be filed) and sample processing. Our “works-like” alpha prototype with the identified changes is expected to be completed by Q4 2026/ Q1 2027.