The Aussie med tech inventors with a global reach
Australians have always excelled in medical research but now a new generation is turning breakthroughs into business.
When the big pharmaceutical and medical tech company Johnson & Johnson closed its Australian operation during the Global Financial Crisis, two of its top industrial scientists Alison Todd and Elisa Mokany realised they had a double problem.
The highly credentialed researchers were not only out of work but about to lose control of a great invention – a radical diagnostic tool for pathologists which they had invented, developed and marketed for the global behemoth.
It was 2009 and J & J were set to sell off the tool to a third party. But the PhDs had different ideas. Together they talked J&J into assigning the IP they had developed into their own company, SpeeDx. J&J took a slice of the action but later sold out, as venture capitalists bought in. Since then, SpeeDx has shipped more than 10 million tests to about 20 countries and helped countless medicos prescribe more accurate treatment to patients.
It’s just one of the success stories of Australian medical research profiled in today’s special magazine, The Top 100 Innovators 2024: The Next Wave.
The stories range from Queensland work on cancer treatment using data gained from century-old human tissues, to a bionic voice box, to a locally designed total artificial heart, to an AI process for designing drugs. The annual list celebrates innovators from across a range of sectors, from AI, manufacturing, retail and agriculture to food and entertainment. The health sector has been highlighted this year, acknowledging the extraordinary opportunities that AI and genomic research are creating for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
As Professor Kathryn North, director of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute writes in the magazine: “Imagine a future where your doctor can tailor your treatment based on your unique genetic make-up and predict and prevent diseases long before any symptoms appear; where you carry your genomic sequence on your smartphone … this isn’t science fiction, it’s the promise of genomics.”
The SpeeDx story shows how a relatively small operation can compete with the big pharma and medical tech companies. The company employs more than 50 people at its headquarters in the Eveleigh industrial precinct in inner Sydney, where it undertakes R&D and manufacturing while selling globally. The company holds another 200 patents for related medical methods and processes invented by the team led by Todd, the chief scientific officer, and Mokany, the chief technology officer.
The pathology test uses DNA to detect diseases in blood, tissue and other samples and allows doctors to more precisely determine treatment. It helps doctors prescribe the best antibiotic to use, a technique that is particularly successful with treatment of sexually transmitted infections.
Todd says the decision by J&J during the GFC to shut down most research outside the US had been a blow to many researchers, but in the end it “just opened the whole world to us”.
In contrast to the SpeeDx research which grew from a commercial operation, the Queensland tissue work is based in a more conventional research lab at the University of Queensland.
It began during the Covid-19 pandemic and was based on century-old human tissue. It has expanded into world-leading research on how to manage the treatment of cancers. The “back to the future” project, led by Professor John Fraser, Dr Arutha Kulasinghe and Associate Professor Kirsty Short, works on extracting data from tissue samples collected during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
The List: Innovators 2024 is out on Friday October 18.
The goal of better understanding future pandemics is still a key part of the research at the school of chemistry and molecular bioscience, but the cancer work is now an important development. The goal is for advanced mapping technology to help doctors understand how each patient’s disease is progressing and responding to treatments.
“We’ve effectively shown we can mine tissues or go back and look at our sort of ancestral tissues that are over 105 years old,” says Kulasinghe. “This is important globally, because in hospitals and in biobanks they throw away cancer tissues. What we’ve shown is that there is so much information in them. We should be creating biobanks around them.”
Working on slivers of century-old lung samples from people who succumbed to the Spanish flu, the team used spatial mapping to create a “Google Maps-like” framework of individual cells to show how they interacted with each other. They hoped to understand why younger people had been more likely to experience worse outcomes from Covid-19, which has been labelled as causing the most lethal pandemic of modern times.
Each sample slide is run through the PhenoCycler-Fusion system machine – the only one of its kind in the country – which creates about 10 terabytes of data, the equivalent of almost 300 days of video.
Fraser, who is also the director of intensive care at St Andrew’s War Memorial Hospital and the critical care research group at Prince Charles Hospital in Brisbane, calls the research “razzle-dazzle medicine”.
“Imagine a fruit salad,” he says. “The way we [test samples] at the moment is we take the bit of tissue, we mush it up, and we look at the general stuff that’s there. It’s like a smoothie. Whereas, with this technique, you can see each grape, each black currant, each kiwifruit, each orange, and also understand how they interact with one another.”
Early in her career, Lydia O’Donnell, 34, thrived as a runner in a system that had largely been set up for men, and when one of her coaches early in her career advised her to diet more – against the advice of dietitians – she did.
“Unfortunately, I was in the hands of people who just didn’t understand me and I was put under quite a lot of pressure to mould my body to fit into these standards which our sport heaps upon us,” says the CEO of Femmi, a running app for women.
“I am really very competitive and driven and was willing to do whatever it was going to take to succeed.” But the advice wasn’t right for O’Donnell, who developed a severe eating disorder and body image issues.
“I’d lost a lot of confidence in myself,” she says. “By the age of about 25, I’d been suffering for about five years and I ended up losing my menstrual cycle.” She was diagnosed with relative energy deficiency syndrome (REDS), which leads to menstrual cycle dysfunction.
After she recovered, O’Donnell began her own research, keen to understand more about her body, her health and optimal ways to train. Later she teamed up with her best friend, Esther Keown, and together the pair founded Femmi, an app for women that tracks their menstrual cycles and provides training advice.
