The winners of all seven categories in the AFR Higher Education Awards 2023, which recognise and celebrate the outstanding efforts of Australian universities during the past year, have now been announced.
The categories include community engagement; emerging leadership; employability; industry engagement; equity and access; research commercialisation; and teaching and learning excellence.
These are the finalists in the research commercialisaion category of the AFR Higher Education Awards:
Winner: University of Sydney, DetectedX
University of Sydney spin-off DetectedX will beef up its computing firepower to pivot from a radiology education hub to a social media platform for medical professionals to share information and ultra-high-resolution images with each other and patients.
Flush from a $500,000 contract win with the United Kingdom National Health Service, the company is hunting for programmers to recast medical imaging and disease detection in the same way that Uber and Airbn have transformed ride sharing and tourism.
DetectedX co-founder and chief executive, Professor Patrick Brennan, says the social network will be “far more valuable” than the company’s education arm which generates roughly $1 million a year in sales.
DetectedX co-founder and chief executive, Professor Patrick Brennan: the step from scientist to entrepreneur is daunting.
It will also attract a higher valuation with potential investors who are currently running the ruler over the start-up, he says.
“If you want to excite a venture capitalist education is not necessarily the way to do it,” Brennan says.
Spun out in 2019 after almost a decade cloistered in the university’s labs, DetectedX is 75 per cent owned by the three disease detection researchers who started it: Professor Patrick Brennan, Professor Mary Rickard, and Dr Moe Suleiman.
It is one of approximately 30 spinoffs that the University of Sydney maintains an equity stake in.
Most of the university’s spinoffs in the las decade are yet to turn a profit. Those that do contribute between $4 million and $5 million a year on average to its coffers.
University of Sydney deputy vice-chancellor of research, Professor Emma Johnston says generous intellectual property agreements are part of the secret sauce when it comes to research translation. It is one of the reasons the university produces the most IP sales, licences, and options of any institution in the country.
University of Sydney academics own their IP and get a third of any profits it
generates. A third goes to their home school to encourage faculties to support research commercialisation activity. The rest reverts to the university to build out the commercialisation support frameworks and infrastructure.
This infrastructure includes student-run incubator programs, on-campus co-working space for start-ups, proof-of-concept grants to build prototypes, a market validation program, as well as an access to an experienced commercialisation team to helpdetermine the best business model or pathway to market.
DetectedX started life as a research project led by Brennan to stop 30 per cent of breast cancers going undetected, largely due to radiologists and radiology registrars misreading mammograms.
The team developed an artificial intelligence assisted interactive assessment tool that has since been expanded to ultrasound, CT scans and MRI screening for a range of cancers including lung and prostate.
Despite being the world’s most published medical radiation scientist, Brennan says commercialisation allows research to have a much greater impact.
“Commercialising forces impact because you must get people using it, engaging with it, buying it, and it has to be sustainable,” he says.
He confesses DetectedX had to completely overhaul its technology to meet the demands of the commercial world when it first spun out.
Today, it has over 4500 users in 150 countries and contracts with the likes of GE Healthcare, Fujifilm and Siemens.
Johnton says the university doesn’t make a lot of revenue from these deals. “Our main aim is to make sure the research is translated and has a real-world impact,” she says.
Monash University, Jupiter Ionics
Monash University spin-out Jupiter Ionics will use a multi-million-dollar capital raise to build up its engineering firepower to capture a large slice of the global market for green ammonia.
Jupiter Ionics chief executive, Charles Day (right) and Monash University’s chief commercialisation officer, Alastair Hick (left): Chasing a slice of the global ammonia market.
The two-year-old company aims to have prototypes of its electrochemical ammonia synthesis in market within three years, as well as a pilot scale plant to demonstrate the technology at industrial scale.
“The scale of transformation in the $US70 billion a year global ammonia market is so large, we want to get to market as quickly as possible, so capital is important,” Jupiter Ionics chief executive, Charles Day says.
Jpiter Ionics co-founders Professor Doug Macfarlane and Alexandr Simonov plugged away in Monash labs for five years developing their breakthrough technology before filing their first patent in 2016. The pair continued to enhance their formula for another five years before establishing the company.
“It was clear to us that there was a business case but figuring out how to focus limited resources at the beginning of an opportunity is one of the most challenging things for universities,” Monash University’s chief commercialisation officer, Alastair Hick says.
Hick headhunted Day from outside the university to help Jupiter Ionics through the commercialisation phase.
Day says the company’s links to the university remain critically important.
Monash University was instrumental in securing $2.5 million in seed funding from angel investors and Tenacious Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, funding agtech and climate startups.
Jupiter Ionics expects to close the current funding roud in December.
Hick says the ability of the university to invest alongside others has helped the capital raising effort.
“It demonstrates we’ve got skin in the game and are willing to put our cash in after conducting the same due diligence as others,” he says.
Jupiter Ionics is one of nearly 30 spinoffs that Monash University holds equity in.
For now, the start-up is firmly rooted in Australia. However, it could relocate to gain a stronger foothold in the global ammonia market.
Hicks is pragmatic about this possible defection. “We support companies like Jupiter through the commercialisation process, through
direct investment and ongoing support on campus, to retain as much value in Australia for as long as it makes sense to do so,” Hick says.
“But you’re not going to keep everything in Australia forever. Once a company is out the door it needs to make commercial decisions,” he says.
RMIT University, IND Technology
RMIT offshoot IND Technology is likely to relocate to the United Sates after a series of big-ticket sales of its early fault detection system to power infrastructure asset owners in California, Pennsylvania, and Canada.
IND Technology co-founder and chief executive Alan Wong says international sales have surged in the last 18 months.
IND Technology co-founder and chief executive, Alan Wong: US sales are booming.
“We’re currently producing more than 600 devices for three major utilities on the east and west coast [of North America] due for delivery in October,” he says.
Sales to Australian utilities now make up less than five percent of the company’s $12 million annual revenue.
“We’re still trying to understand exactly why that is,” Wong says.
Based on its current trajectory, Wong is confident the company can double sales within the next three years without external funding.
It has been a decade since Wong and his colleagues established IND Technology and see if they could make their research work in the real world. The company has been cashfow positive from its outset.
It was a risky move for an academic, Wong says. “I put my publication record at risk,” he says.
However, like Brennan, he feels the social impact created through commercialising research is far greater than a paper sitting in a database that gets referred to occasionally.
RMIT deputy vice-chancellor and vice president research and innovation, Professor Calum Drummond, says patents are just one pathway to create impact from research translation. But industry engagement is key regardless of which route researchers take.
RMIT reshaped its research translation framework eight years ago to deepen its industry connections. It now signs approximately 1000 research contracts with industry partners each year.
This connection ensures relevance, says Drummond, which creates impact even if it takes decades to materialise.
IND Technology is looking to establish a manufacturing plant in Delaware to support growth. It currently exports devices out of Richmond in Melourne where the company has a team of around 30 engineers.
Wong says US and Canadian utilities are demonstrating a higher appetite for
advanced remote monitoring technologies to improve network performance and safety.
He says the best thing that universities can do to help researchers with
entrepreneurial aspirations is leave them alone and let them fail out of the spotlight.
“Success comes through a series of failures,” Wong says. He feels universities make the mistake of being too prescriptive and pushing spinouts down a particular path.
Brennan says scientists are often discouraged from taking the scary step to
entrepreneur by “arrogant assumptions” that they should know how to register a company or what an employee stock option plan is. “We’ve got to be a lot more nurturing of our great scientists to help them make that transition,” Brennan says