The instrument is built where the biology is read.
AWLabs runs its own applied-research laboratory. Detection chemistry, capture methods, and the instruments that carry them into hospitals are developed in the same room, against the same reference methods that accredited institutions use to check our work.
Design-phase stand-in. Photography of the Charleroi laboratory and the people in it is in production and replaces this image before launch.
Why a laboratory
You cannot buy this off a shelf.
Reading airborne biology in real time is not an integration problem. There is no sensor to source, no module to license: the capture method, the biological assay, and the instrument around them have to be developed together, and each one constrains the other two. That is the reason AWLabs is organized as a laboratory rather than a product company, and the reason roughly 70% of its R&D is carried by competitive public funding rather than by revenue.
What happens here
Four capabilities, one room.
Capture
Development and characterisation of the sampling methods that bring airborne biological material out of a moving volume of air and into a state where it can be measured at all. The hard part of airborne detection is upstream of the detector.
Detection
The biological assay: identifying pathogens themselves rather than the particle counts and environmental proxies the market currently substitutes for them. This is the work protected by the Sentinel patent filed in Q1 2026.
Validation
Every analytical method is checked against accredited reference laboratories — principally ULB CREST — rather than against our own thresholds. A method AWLabs validates alone is a method nobody has validated.
Instrumentation
Turning a working method into hardware that survives an operating block: the engineering that carries a laboratory result into a corridor, a clean room, or an isolation ward, and back again as data.
Equipment inventory, containment classification, and laboratory headcount are being consolidated for publication and will be listed here in verifiable form.
Laboratory and field
The field is an extension of the bench.
Deployments are not a commercial activity downstream of the research. They are how the research gets its data.
A capture or detection method is developed and characterised in Charleroi under controlled conditions.
The method is validated against accredited laboratory methods at partner institutions, so a result is defensible outside our own walls.
The method goes into an instrument and into real critical environments: hospital proofs of concept on three continents.
Field data comes back to the bench as the constraint on the next iteration. Real air is messier than test air, and that is the point.
Where the laboratory sits
Not working alone.
The laboratory is embedded in the Belgian and European research infrastructure rather than standing beside it: as a tenant of Biopark Charleroi, as coordinator of an EU Horizon consortium, and as a working partner of the public institutes that set reference methods.
Biopark Charleroi
The biotechnology campus that hosts the laboratory
ULB / CREST
Belgian reference laboratory for indoor air quality; validation partner for AWLabs analytical methods
Sciensano
Belgian institute for public health: biological risk expertise
VITO · IssEP
Flemish and Walloon research institutes for environmental measurement science
Multitel · Sirris
Applied research centres supporting instrumentation and industrialisation
PANDA (EU Horizon)
AWLabs coordinates the consortium; €700K
The people in it
A laboratory is a group of people, not an address.
The researchers who run the bench, and the Board of Scientific Advisors who check what leaves it, are listed with the rest of the team. Portrait sessions and bios are in production; every profile is published only in its final, validated form.
Questions for the bench?
Method questions are answered by the people who ran the experiment, not by a sales team. Research institutions, clinical partners, and investors are all welcome to ask.