T.E. Laboratories (TelLab), with headquarters in Co Carlow, has secured just under €900,000 from the European programme to help bring a water quality monitoring device to the market.
It has also become one of the first companies in the Republic to win funding under Enterprise Ireland’s pilot intellectual property grant scheme.
Established in 1991, TelLab manufactures chemicals, reagents and standards for pharmaceutical, medical device and food manufacturers.
The company has received funding of €892,067 from the European Commission for its Life EcoSens Aquamonitrix project to bring a new water quality monitoring device to the market.
It has also secured funding under the new IP Plus grant under Enterprise Ireland's new pilot programme run by Enterprise Ireland. The programme allows companies to spend up to €70,000 on external advisers to help develop an intellectual property strategy with the grant covering a portion of the cost.
"TelLab is now generating significant levels of IP, both internally and through collaborative projects, having invested heavily in research over the past eight years. We have a number of potentially game-changing sensors and analytical instrumentation in the product-development pipeline, and we are very excited about their prospects, particularly in the US," said chief executive Mark Bowkett.
“As these products get closer to market, we are starting to realise that perhaps, up to now, we hadn’t given IP enough attention. The IP Plus grant is helping us to address this [and] the advice we’ve received from our IP attorney has made a fantastic impact in a short space of time. It is changing the landscape of how we protect our IP and derive maximum benefit from it,” he added.