A Short History

A Detailed History

The UBI Process

About Ultraviolet Light

References

THE LUMEN CONCEPT

Current Practice
The Lumen Concept

Existing UBI systems will do the job, but there is a lot of room for improvement.  We at Lumen believe we have designed a system that will overcome existing shortfalls, one that will provide quick, effective treatment of infections, and do so at a huge reduction in costs.

Here’s a comparison of current practice with our system.

Current Practice

Most existing UBI devices operate on a “flow-through” concept, where blood is taken from a patient, conducted via tubing to a quartz cuvette or other container. Here it is exposed to the light from a UV lamp, collected in a second container, and then returned to the patient via the same route by means of a peristaltic pump. Usually the blood is radiated a second time as it passes back through the cuvette.

This system is quite simple and straightforward, but it has several disadvantages:

• It takes some time to set up the apparatus.
• The quartz cuvette used as a treatment chamber tends to be quite expensive, which in turn makes the process costly.
• In this day and age of HIV and hepatitis, cleaning and re-using materials that have come into contact with human blood is not an acceptable practice, so all the materials used for this set-up becomes contaminated waste requiring disposal (including the expensive quartz cuvette).

A further disadvantage to existing systems is that they use lamps that produce light primarily in the UVC range of the spectrum. But it is the UVB portion of the spectrum that produces the immune-enhancing effect.

As discussed on the Ultraviolet Light page, prolonged exposure to UVC light is harmful to living tissue, so exposure times must be severely limited. So if a lamp produces mainly UVC light and very little of the beneficial UVB, and the time a blood sample is exposed to the UVC must be limited, it follows that the amount of UVB received by the sample is extremely small.

This is what leads to the need for multiple treatments using existing systems.

The Lumen Concept

Lumen’s approach to conducting the therapy differs from the standard in several respects.

The SP-1 device doesn’t use the “flow-through” design concept.  Instead, it treats the blood sample in the syringe with which it is drawn from and returned to the patient.

Doing this eliminates the need for tubing and a collection bottle, and reduces the contaminated waste requiring disposal to the one syringe and one or perhaps two needles.  This helps reduce both complexity and cost.

That syringe will be made of a special UV-transparent plastic rather than quartz. This will result in massively reduced cost, so that making the syringes disposable will be cost-effective.

Next, the syringe and the irradiation chamber have been designed to complement each other in multiple ways. The shape of the chamber’s reflectors and the syringe optimize the irradiation process, ensuring that the sample is treated thoroughly and evenly, and in the minimum time. The method of agitating the sample is unique, with no other known UBI system using anything similar.

Finally, as mentioned elsewhere, the lamps used in the Lumen device produce light almost exclusively in the beneficial UVB range of the spectrum, with only a little bit of harmless UVA produced. This eliminates the potentially damaging UVC light that limits the existing systems. Not only will this likely eliminate the rare occurrence of Herxheimer-type reactions seen with other UBI systems, but more importantly it will permit much longer exposure times, reducing or even eliminate the need for repeat treatments.

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