Ball Wave NEWS RELEASE

16 December 2021
Ball Wave Inc.

Ball Wave selected for FY2021 NEDO TRY:Promotion of development of a ball SAW sensor to detect airborne viruses in less than a minuteBall Wave Inc. (Head office: Sendai City, Miyagi Prefecture; CEO: Dr. Shingo Akao) has applied for andbeen selected for the second round of the TRY program offered by the New Energy and Industrial
Technology Development Organization (NEDO). The TRY program aims to promote Technology-based
startups that innovatively Respond to economic changes to Yield social benefits as part of theTechnology-based Startup Support Program. (https://www.nedo.go.jp/koubo/CA3_100316.html)

Applications for the TRY program were accepted from technology-based startups with specificbusiness plans that take the sudden upheavals in the market environment since the start of 2020 as abusiness chance, and the program offers assistance in the form of grants, in principle up to 100 million
yen and with a grant rate of two-thirds or less of the eligible expenses.
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread around the world since the start of the 2020, and it
has become clear that this novel infectious disease has an unprecedented difficulty of control. The virus isspread by the dispersal of viral particles into the surrounding air as aerosols from the exhaled breath ofpatients before the onset of illness or asymptomatic infected people. This means that the spread of the virus
must be controlled by rapid detection of infected people who do not display symptoms. PCR tests andantigen tests of nose and throat swabs or saliva are used to check for infection, but these tests require noseand throat swabs or saliva samples to be taken from each individual to be tested, which is laborious andtime-consuming. Also, there is the difficulty that antigen tests take over 10 minutes, while PCR tests may
take several hours or more. There is therefore a pressing need that has yet to be met for a rapid detection
technology that can somehow detect viruses non-invasively in asymptomatic patients or in the air.

Ball Wave NEWS RELEASE

16 December 2021
Ball Wave Inc.

(a) Hospitals(b) Quarantine(c) Classrooms(d) Airport lounges

This is a critical situation, and Ball Wave has responded by commencing joint development aimed atcommercialization of a virus sensor with Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd., one of our shareholders, and Tohoku
University. This device is based on a sensor that uses the ball SAW,1 Ball Wave’s proprietary coretechnology, which is capable of detecting chemicals in gas with ultra-high sensitivity and ultra-fast response.
The addition of bioengineering technology allows the device to detect viruses directly from airborne
aerosols.
http://ballwave.jp/images/20210925.pdf
With this grant from NEDO TRY, we will aim for early commercialization of the virus sensor, in particularby speeding up the development of the bioengineering technology.

■ About Ball Wave
Ball Wave is a venture company that was launched by Tohoku University. The company aims to bringabout a safe, secure, clean, and sustainable society through the use of the ball SAW sensor, a chemicalsensor2 developed by the university as an early-stage, innovative technology. The ball SAW sensor iscapable of rapid, highly sensitive detection of trace amounts of moisture and various different gases. Itcombines the high resistance to temperature, pressure, and corrosion of quartz balls with approximately 100times the sensitivity and response speed of conventional sensors. Ball Wave is currently working on thedevelopment, manufacture, and sale of trace moisture meters and gas chromatographs equipped with ball
SAW sensors.
Website: http://ballwave.jp/
1Ball SAW: Ball surface acoustic wave（SAW: Surface Acoustic Wave）

Ball Wave NEWS RELEASE
2Sensor technology for detecting chemical changes in materials

Contact:
Ball Wave Inc.
E-mail: info@ballwave.jp / Tel: 022-302-6659

16 December 2021
Ball Wave Inc.