The Eye in the System
Interview with Sven Schönfelder, Managing Director of INSION GmbH
Due to rapid technological progress, spectroscopy as an analytical technology is more accessible to a wider range of users than ever before: from the classic laboratory environment to process technology, the food and agriculture industry, and point-of-care diagnostics. As a manufacturer of spectral sensors, INSION GmbH from the greater Stuttgart area plays a key role. In an interview with Wirtschaftsforum, founder and managing director Sven Schönfelder revealed, among other things, which additional application fields and benefits perspectives the INSION team is working on.
Wirtschaftsforum: Mr. Schönfelder, you were already addressing the range of topics in microoptics back in the 1990s - what ultimately prompted the establishment of INSION?
Sven Schönfelder: The processes and product concepts in microoptics developed at KIT provided a valuable basis for industrial applications. These led to the first products and applications in microtechnology at the company microParts in Dortmund during the early 2000s, in process technology and medical diagnostics. Under the umbrella of the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, the potential of microspectrometers as a detection platform for personalized medicine became evident in the subsequent years. In 2011, I had the opportunity to buy out this business division from the corporation and continue it independently. It was an opportunity I gladly seized, since there were no comparable spectrophotometers and spectral sensors in the market environment with our precision, robustness, and scalability. In 2020, we were able to achieve such good results in one of our main projects that INSION grew significantly in terms of personnel and space during a massive production ramp-up.
Wirtschaftsforum: What specific solutions do you offer your customers and how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
Sven Schönfelder: With our spectral sensors, we essentially develop the sensor technology for OEMs, which then serves as the 'eye' in the respective analysis system. Since our components thus take on the complete material recognition and quantification, we make a substantial contribution to the quality and functionality of the end devices. A central unique selling point of INSION is our technology, with which we can produce the complete spectrometer in a single injection molding step on a chip. To achieve this, we had to overcome several physical limits in the course of our development work. The mirrors on our spectrometers are currently manufactured using ultra-high vacuum deposition technology. The resulting sensor thus has a robustness and stability that makes it excellent for use in critical environments or as a handheld device.
Wirtschaftsforum: Which application areas are the focus of your attention?
Sven Schönfelder: Our focus has been on medical diagnostics to date. In particular, we have gained experience with transcutaneous measurement of blood parameters, such as with an FDA-approved bilirubin measuring device for early detection of jaundice in newborns without blood sampling. Blood gas measurements or conventional In-Vitro Diagnostics (IVD) also represent central application areas of our technology. Some of our customers, for example, realize lab-on-a-chip systems on postage stamp-sized chips, in which our products represent the optical sensor technology. These products are capable of detecting and quantifying extremely difficult-to-detect biomarkers. They were used, for example, during the coronavirus pandemic.
Wirtschaftsforum: Are there also applications beyond the medical field?
Sven Schönfelder: We have been growing beyond the typical laboratory environment for some time and are getting involved, for example, in the food and agricultural machinery sectors, where our spectrometers are used on combine harvesters. There, they sit on the pipe through which the threshed crop is blown into the tank, and determine 'on the fly' various parameters including moisture, protein, and starch content. In combination with GPS data, this provides farmers with a clear picture of the most productive areas on their fields, besides the economic value of their product. This application segment clearly shows the robustness of our spectrometers. They can withstand stressful situations day in and day out and always deliver reliable measurement data. But important applications also exist in the meat and sausage processing industries and in the restaurant environment, such as determining the ripening times of fruits and vegetables or assessing how long ago the fish served at the sushi bar was caught.
Wirtschaftsforum: What do you see as the next central development steps for INSION?
Sven Schönfelder: The technological development that we have experienced in our segment over the last 30 years has certainly been breathtaking. In the 1990s, initial high-quality VGA cameras came with price tags of 20,000 USD; today, modules of this quality are available for just 2 USD. The same applies to material analytics: Where system prices stood at 100,000 EUR in the past, today we can produce with cost blocks of just a few hundred euros - with even larger quantities than our current production capacity of about 100,000 units per year, maybe even cheaper in the future.
An important technological development step for the coming years is to make our products smarter: Today we still primarily deliver physically traceable spectral sensors, whose outputs are converted into analytical results by our OEM customers. In the future, however, we want to shift the interface to the customer further to our side with intelligent systems and tap into ‘handheld’ applications that are still dependent on laboratory analytics. By using multiplex detection and Lab-on-a-Chip technologies, we want to make spectroscopy as an analytical technique accessible to even broader user groups. Ideally, it would then be sufficient if our customer’s staff could train the respective sensor with some samples; subsequently, it would handle the assignment and quantification automatically. From our perspective, spectroscopy is also likely to closely integrate with imaging technology. Not least for this reason, INSION moved to the campus of camera manufacturer IDS a few years ago. We are currently working on promising pre-projects to merge image and material information into one product. We expect this to open up further growth potential.