From footy to the army to medicine, this inventor is combining his skills to create world-first technology
With three expanding companies and inventions such as the Field Micro Screws, Queensland Dr Chris Jeffery has renowned for his innovation
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Cantering towards the final jump, Nickola McNabb can feel the crowd’s excitement building. The last Australian woman to win the Badminton Horse Trials, considered one of the toughest and most competitive equestrian events in the world, was Lucinda Fredericks on Headley Britannia in 2007.
Now, after a challenging but accomplished three days of dressage, cross country and show jumping in southern England, all that stands between Nickola and a historic victory is a 1.3m triple oxer.
Leaning forward, she feels the muscles of her Arab-Warmblood stallion Monte Carlo bunch as he soars into the air … Oomph! Nickola, 14, lands on her bum in a drought-ravaged paddock at home in Eltham, just outside Lismore in northern NSW, a bareback Monte looking on in bemusement.
The smart uniform, show ring and cheering crowds have disappeared in clouds of dust and sharp pain.
Her left ring finger is broken, caught in the reins when Monte misjudged the height of the fallen log in his path.
Nickola’s date with history is set, just not in the way she imagined.
It is six months before mum Yvonne Demaagd realises how badly Nickola’s finger has healed, and the painful effect it has on her riding.
In a stroke of serendipity, it is the same time Brisbane doctor Chris Jeffery and orthopaedic surgeon Greg Couzens are preparing to launch the world’s smallest biomedical screw, which is attracting global interest with its potential to revolutionise the treatment of small bone fractures.
Aspiring Olympian Nickola is wheeled into the Brisbane Private Hospital’s theatre to have her finger straightened by Jeffery and Couzens in the world-first operation using the Field Micro Screw, which is somewhat fitting given its very development is largely one of fateful meetings and opportunities grabbed.
At the centre is Jeffery, a remarkable young man with an insatiable curiosity and drive to change the world, who has carved an award-winning career as an engineer, Australian Defence Force captain, doctor, and now the medical device designer behind three multimillion-dollar companies. And he’s only 32 years old.
The affable father-of-two and novice skier, who served as former prime minister Julia Gillard’s security detail and dined alongside Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, during a royal visit to Brisbane, says his philosophy is simple.
“Whenever I’m asked, I explain my life as a chaotic narrative of following the shiny, bouncy ball,” he says.
“I don’t know if I ever know where I’m going. I like finding new solutions to new problems. To quench my curiosity is my game plan day-to-day, that’s my motivation.”
CAPTAIN IN THE MAKING
A life on the footy field was all Jeffery was interested in growing up in Manly West, on Brisbane’s bayside, with dad Gil, now 79, a truck driver, mother Coral, 60, a stay-at-home mum who later worked as a cook, and younger brother Allan, 30, a chef.
Jeffery’s focus changed – slightly at least – when Wynnum State High Year 10 maths teacher Paul Young, disappointed at Jeffery’s falling marks, asked what he wanted to do with his life. Off the cuff, Jeffery nominated “engineer” – he thought Marvel superhero Iron Man’s alter ego Tony Stark (who earned a master’s degree in engineering) was pretty cool and besides, this was the career followed by a cousin, the only person in his extended family to go to university.
“Mr Young said, ‘oh, you’re not smart enough to do that’, and that was either the best reverse psychology in my life or just a really mean thing to say to a kid, but either way it spurred me into action,” laughs Jeffery.
Playing representative and semi-professional rugby league with the Wynnum Manly Seagulls earnt him a sporting scholarship to the University of Queensland to study engineering, but difficulty juggling six nights’ a week club, rep and uni team training with maintaining the required 6 grade point average led Jeffery to switch to a military scholarship with the Australian Defence Force.
Graduating from the Queensland University of Technology in 2007 with the J. H. Curtis Award for best thesis for his work on electric vehicles, Jeffery became a commissioned officer with the Royal Australian Electrical Mechanical Engineering Corp (RAEME), stationed with 101 Workshop Company in Darwin.
He earned the Australian Army Capability Award for a software program he designed to improve the speed and efficiency of troop deployment, after which he was promoted and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of Operation Slipper.
“I was the adjutant of the Force Support Unit, which is just a nice word for the Commanding Officer’s lackey; I was the officer who runs around organising stuff.
It was really good for a young 20-year-old to be given that opportunity, because if you can manage 300 staff in a war zone, you can manage anything,” he says.
Volunteering in the military hospitals in his own time and witnessing the miracles performed by trauma surgeons, Jeffery fell in love with medicine and decided to retrain as a surgeon. “It’s very sad but I still remember the babies that were amputees. They had been carried by their parents, their parents stood on a landmine, the parents had died and the babies had lost some of their limbs, and they just get left in the hospitals by themselves.
“I would see the amazing work the orthopaedic surgeons who would come over for short stints as volunteers would do, and I found it fascinating how they could fix such complicated trauma and bring people back from what you thought was certain death. I just loved it. Once I get interested in something, I just want to know more about it.”
At the end of his nine-month deployment, Jeffery relocated to Melbourne’s Defence Materiel Organisation to redesign electronic warfare assets on unarmoured vehicles.
By the time his team completed that project – in half the expected time for a third of the allocated $3 million budget – he’d been accepted into the University of Queensland medical school.
Starting in 2011, he also won a scholarship to be part of UQ’s Medical Leadership Program, completing a Graduate Certificate in Executive Business as part of his degree.
While keen to pursue a career in the highly competitive field of surgery and to specialise in orthopaedics, Jeffery made a name for himself in research, publishing the first of many papers in his first year of medicine alongside vascular surgeons, Drs Simon and John Quinn OAM. Then in 2016 and 2017 he took out one of the Australian Orthopaedic Association’s top scientific research awards, the Bill Crawford Award for Best Basic Scientific Registrar Paper.
“I found this blend of skills. In engineering, we get taught to find problems, break them into first principles and then find solutions. In medicine we get complex problems where we have a sea of knowledge and you have to find how the jigsaw goes back together,” says Jeffery, who lives in Brisbane’s inner-north Teneriffe with partner Briana Maher, 27, an English teacher. He shares custody of his children, Amelia, 7, and Harrison, 3, with his ex-wife.
“I find myself combining these two worlds, being given problems in medicine where I could break it down into first principles, turn a complex thing into a bunch of simple problems, solve each part and then reassemble them,” Jeffery says.
DESIGNS ON INVENTING
Create, Connect, Inspire. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry Queensland slogan displayed on its Wickham Tce building, where Jeffery is based, could just as easily have been written for the 2017 Brisbane Lord Mayor Entrepreneur of the Year and his three rapidly expanding companies – Field Orthopaedics, Audeara and Yumm! Confectionery, which uses chocolate to fund mental health resources for young people.
Though he never intended to become a designer, each company sprang out of Jeffery’s frustration with shortfalls in current medical treatments and his ability to create solutions, often in collaboration with like-minded doctors and engineers.
This is a man very quick to acknowledge the importance of every person in his team, from collaborating surgeons to senior designers to the administrative staff. For example, every kit used to house the pioneering Field Micro Screws and accompanying tools features all their signatures.
It all started when, as a junior doctor at Ipswich Hospital in 2014, exasperated with long waiting times experienced by children with behavioural issues needing to see an audiologist and ear, nose and throat specialist, Jeffery wrote a computer program called Audeara to deliver a simple diagnostic hearing test.
“The vision was patients could come, they could put on these headsets in the waiting room, they get their ‘can you hear the beep?’ test and I’d be able to look at it and even crudely be able to say, well, there might be something wrong with your hearing or your hearing looks really good, let’s go into more invasive testing.”
Encouraged by the enthusiastic reception from senior colleagues, Jeffery set about establishing a manufacturing company with collaborator Dr James Fielding, now Audeara’s chief executive. Both quickly learnt that was easier said than done.
A 2010 Stanford University (US) study found it took an average $39 million and 31 months for designers to get low-to-moderate-risk medical devices approved.
Undeterred, the pair raised seed funding to commercialise headphones that automatically personalise sound to a user’s individual hearing profile, with plans to use the profits to develop the medical device.
Even then, he says, Audeara “was just a hobby”. At the same time Jeffery, by now embarking on his PhD and working at South Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital, was being pestered by his orthopaedic colleagues to fix their bugbears.
Complications arise in an estimated 40 per cent of cases from the use of orthopaedic devices. Supported by investors including David Trimboli and the Flannery family, the Field Micro Screw system was developed in only 18 months for $600,000 – “and that included the Christmas party” – by Jeffery, Couzens and Dr Libby Anderson, to dramatically improve the treatment of small bone fractures commonly seen in the hand and wrist.
To date, surgeons have used wires to fix delicate bone fragments into place, checked the positioning with X-rays and then drilled separate holes for the permanent screws.
The Field Micro Screw is smaller, hollow and placed directly over the wire, which is then removed. The result is faster repairs, more accurate placement, less damage to surrounding soft tissue, and better patient outcomes.
“One millimetre of error has about 90 per cent chance of arthritis, so accuracy matters,” Jeffery says. “One in six people has arthritis, and just think about how much pain and bother they have in their life.”
With the Micro Screw approved by the US Food & Drug Administration and launched in Las Vegas this month and similar certification processes under way in Australia and Europe, Jeffery says, in 2019 Field Orthopaedics will transform from “Brisbane sweetheart to global player”.
Hospitals and distributors in 10 US states requested stocks of the screw before its official launch, with another 10 relegated to a waiting list set up to manage manufacturing time frames.
Field Orthopaedics anticipates the release of three more medical devices this year, and has another seven in development.
Jeffery estimates the company is now worth more than $100 million and employs about 50 staff locally – a number expected to increase when manufacturing is shifted from Asia to southeast Queensland by October. Audeara, launched in China in December and fast attracting interest in the UK and US, is worth about $25 million, and Yumm! Confectionery, run by Braeden Leay, about $7 million.
“A friend, Peter Ball, who runs the social impact accelerator Impact Academy, defines social impact businesses as any company that does a net good to the world,” Jeffery says. “If you accept that, all our companies are social impact businesses. They’re all companies that have a purpose, that are very innovative, they’re very novel, and they’re pushing boundaries. We’re doing this for the purposes of getting better [health] outcomes for people.”
RIDING HIGH
It’s been about six weeks since the Brisbane Private Hospital theatre rang with applause and cheers as the first of two Field Micro Screws – one 10mm long, one 8mm – was inserted into Nickola McNabb’s repaired finger by Couzens during a one-hour-and-40-minute operation, assisted by Jeffery.
“I don’t know who designed this but they are a genius!” Couzens quipped at the big moment. “This is the hand she’ll be waving to the crowd when she wins the Olympic gold medal.” Later, with Nickola on her way to the recovery ward, he said: “I’m just relieved the case went really well. When we put the screw in, the fragment reduced, the joint went perfectly back into alignment. The screws themselves and all the equipment associated with them performed exactly as designed, exactly as we anticipated they would.”
Now the stitches are out and with a special splint fitted to her straight finger, Nickola can at last get back to riding her beloved Monte Carlo and training for this year’s busy equestrian and agricultural show seasons, during which she will compete throughout Queensland and NSW.
“This operation has been huge for Nickola, because in dressage you’ve got two sets of reins and must have use of all your fingers,” says her mum, Yvonne Demaagd.
“The reins are like telephone lines to the horse’s mouth, the rest is feet and body, and the sport is all about very subtle movements, not showing the judges or the crowds what instructions you’re giving the horse.”
The next challenge Jeffery will tackle is the Kokoda Track next month, as an ambassador for charity ACT For Kids, which provides free therapy and support services for children and families who have experienced abuse or neglect. After that, he shrugs, who knows what the next shiny ball to catch his attention will be?
“I love what I do and if you really love what you do, you never really work a day in your life, right? One of the most meaningful things about medical device development is the fact they make people’s lives better,” Jeffery says.
“Every day we’re working on a product, every day we’re delayed from testing or lack of support is another day a patient will go suffering without that innovation or without that solution.
“Every time a new product comes out, it’s unbelievable. Who would have thought a kid who only wanted to play rugby league and grew up in Wynnum, with a father who worked as a truck driver for the council, was going to be blending engineering, science and medicine to make novel devices that increase healthcare outcomes the world has never seen before?
“It’s unfathomable.” ■
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