An Australian company has taken one of the country's top design honours for a machine built to solve one of healthcare's most stubborn cleaning problems.
The CORIS System, made by infection prevention company Nanosonics, won Gold in the Product Design Medical and Scientific category at the 2026 Australian Good Design Awards.
The system automates cleaning flexible endoscopes before disinfection. The instruments are essential to modern medicine for both diagnosis and treatment, yet their sophisticated design makes them very difficult to clean. When cleaning fails, soil and contamination can remain in the narrow internal channels and increase patients' risk of infection. Manual cleaning of those channels is variable, difficult to verify and linked to contamination events.
The Good Design jury recognised the system as a highly innovative solution to a complex maintenance and hygiene challenge in healthcare.
"The team is commended for tackling the very challenging area of endoscope reprocessing, with the potential to deliver meaningful benefits for both patient safety and clinical workflows," the jury said. "The Jury was impressed by the cross-disciplinary product development involving a vast range of users, practitioners, engineers and designers, representing years of market understanding and R&D effort. Stand-out features include improved hygiene outcomes and a significantly more efficient cleaning process, with the System's ability to reduce cross-contamination risk clearly important to patients and the medical industry."
"We are honoured the CORIS System has been recognised as a Gold Winner. This award belongs to a team that spent years working alongside clinicians and reprocessing staff around the world to understand a problem that has challenged healthcare for decades," said Michael Kavanagh, CEO and President of Nanosonics.
"Great design in infection prevention is about patient care and safety, and importantly, making the working day better for the people delivering it. The CORIS System was designed and is manufactured here in Australia, and we are proud to see Australian innovation recognised in this way," he said.
In 2025, the system was included in the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods and received De Novo clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a pathway reserved for genuinely novel technologies. Nanosonics says research published in the Journal of Hospital Infection in 2024 found the system delivers superior cleaning performance compared with manual methods.
The system replaces manual brushing and flushing with a standardised process that sends suspended particles through every internal channel, using friction to remove soil and biofilm from passages that cannot be brushed. Each automated cycle takes about 15 minutes and is digitally recorded to support traceability and compliance.
The Australian Good Design Awards were established in 1958 under the auspices of the Industrial Design Council of Australia and are the country's most enduring international design awards program, spanning 13 design disciplines and more than 30 categories.
