Entrepreneurs from the medical and healthcare sectors make up more than a third of the Top 100 innovators list.
Over a third of a list of Australia’s top 100 innovators come from the medical and healthcare sectors.
The Australian released its annual list of innovation leaders today, and it’s chock full of entrepreneurs from medicine and healthcare.
Dr Farzaneh Ahmadi, founder of bionic voice box producer Laronix, was one of the 35 people from the medical and healthcare sectors.
Dr Ahmadi launched the company, which aims to give people who have lost their larynx due to laryngeal cancer their voice back, after not being able to provide practical solutions to patients she encountered while completing her PhD.
The Brisbane-based company has expanded to New York and has raised over $4 million from government grants and investors.
Two groups aimed at improving cardiovascular surgery – Dr Daniel Timms (inventor of the BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart) and Professors Michael Vallely and Paul Bannon, Dr Hugh Paterson, and medical device engineer Ashish Mitra (co-founders of the Sydney Heart Valve) also feature on the list.
Dr Timms’ product, which was developed alongside his father Gary, who died of heart failure, has a chance to become the world’s first permanent artificial heart replacement. The titanium pump contains a single levitating magnetic disk that pushes blood around the body and could one day be used as an off-the-shelf alternative.
Dr Timms received $50 million in government funding earlier this year and has Medical Research Future Fund backing to trial the technology in Australian patients.
Similarly, the Sydney Heart Valve was designed to support the existing valve, minimising the damage associated with existing artificial replacement options. It has been described as “a major step forward in valve design”.
University of Melbourne engineering graduate Grace Brown, founder of robotics and AI startup Andromeda, was included for developing Abi, a robot aimed to reduce isolation and loneliness in children and elderly patients.
“I was basically trying to build a robot that could give me a hug during a time like the pandemic, where I was completely isolated from the rest of the world,” Ms Brown told The Australian. The company closed a $3 million seed funding round in the middle of the year.
Adelaide-based pair Dr Santosh Verghese and Rhys Parker made the list for their efforts in establishing SA Health’s capacity to build synthetic datasets based on real patient information that can be used in research and other clinical studies.
Dr Verghese, who is the organisation’s chief medical information officer and an intensive care specialist at Flinders Medical Centre, believes the approach will become commonplace in medical and health research in years to come, as it is commonly used in other industries like finance.
Others who made the list include:
- Lydia O’Donnell, co-founder of running app and menstrual cycle tracker Femmi;
- Kavita Nadan, co-founder of pharmacy locum finder Locumate;
- Mark Waller and Jingjing Guo, co-founders of the novel drug discover and synthesis platform Pending AI;
- Doug Ward, CEO of ASX-listed company Lumos Diagnostics;
- Tom Oxley and Professor Nicholas Opie, co-founders of Synchronon, a brain implant interface used in people with neural diseases;
- Kai Van Lieshout and Linus Talacko, co-founders of AI transcription company Lyrebird Health;
- Scott Kirkland and Stuart Crozier, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of medical device company EMVision, who have developed a backpack-sized brain scanner that can detect a stroke in roughly five minutes.
The complete list of the Top 100 is available online.