To mark our 150th episode, we are delighted to introduce MTPConnect’s newly appointed Chair, the Honorable Jaala Pulford. A passionate advocate for the medical technology, biotech and pharmaceutical sector, Jaala has a long and distinguished career in government including Minister for Innovation, Medical Research and the Digital Economy. 

Jaala chats with host Caroline Duell about her ministerial achievements, how COVID-19 has refocused our efforts on sovereign innovation and manufacturing, and how she hopes to build on MTPConnect’s seven years of success and help more Australian innovative medical products make it to patients.

The Targeted Translation Research Accelerator (TTRA) program, a Medical Research Future Fund initiative delivered by MTPConnect, launched Round 3 of its Research Projects funding opportunity on 30 January 2023 to support diabetes and cardiovascular disease projects that address the unmet health and medical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in rural, remote, regional, and urban centres.

The translation of knowledge and evidence into practice is challenging, and thoughtful and systematic implementation into healthcare systems and communities is key for new products and innovations to be effective, acceptable and sustainable. In this podcast, you will hear from Professor Gillian Harvey, Strength Lead, Implementation at the Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) and Professor Ray Mahoney, Professor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Discipline Lead for Population Health, Flinders University and Visiting Scientist, Australian eHealth Research Centre (AeHRC), CSIRO. They explore the general principles of Implementation Science, and what it looks like in practice with examples within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research. Applications for the Round 3 funding opportunity close 28 April 2023.

It’s three years ago this month that COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. We’ve seen nearly 800 million confirmed cases around the world and nearly 7 million deaths… and there are signs that another wave is underway in Australia as we head into the colder months. But imagine those numbers if we didn’t have the vaccines – particularly the mRNA vaccines.  

In this episode, we meet the Hungarian born, US scientist Dr Katalin Karikó. It’s her research, along with collaborator, Dr Drew Weissman from the University of Pennsylvania, that gave the world the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines. 

Dr Karikó is one of the key participants in this year’s ‘Science Meets Parliament’ conference, delivered by Science and Technology Australia (STA).

She is joined by STA’s Chief Executive, Mischa Schubert, for a fireside chat on International Women’s Day.

MTPConnect is again partnering with STA for the ‘Science Meets Parliament’ National Press Club Address later this month, which will be delivered by Industry and Science Minister Ed Husic. 

Our Targeted Translation Research Accelerator (TTRA) program, a Medical Research Future Fund initiative delivered by MTPConnect, launched Round 3 of its Research Projects funding opportunity in January 2023 to support diabetes and cardiovascular disease projects that address the unmet health and medical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in rural, remote, regional, and urban centres.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research ethics is an important part of research projects that involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. During the webinar, you will hear from two speakers with extensive experience in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research ethics from both an ethics committee and a researcher perspective: Dr Summer May Finlay – Co-Chair of the Aboriginal Health and Medical Research Council of NSW Ethics Committee, and Professor Jenni Judd – Professorial Research Fellow, Central Queensland University. They explore researchers’ ethical obligations, when you need to submit to an Aboriginal Human Research Ethics Committee, and the importance of cultural safety in research design and reciprocity. Applications close 28 April 2023.

We talk to Sydney-based eye surgeon Dr Sarah Crowe, Founder and Director of 4eyesVision who has invented the 4eyesVision Kit to correct refractive error, the leading cause of blindness in the developing world and provide affordable glasses on the spot for people in remote and developing communities. Dr Crowe shares her clinician entrepreneur story that started in the Solomon Islands and progressed with the help of the Kokoda Track Foundation. She took her innovation through the 2020 Australian Technologies Competition winning the Global Social Impact Division, and the Health 10x Accelerator program winning a 2022 UNSW Founders Award. Having dispensed 1,000 pairs of glasses already, Dr Crowe is now focused on securing funding to scale up the organisation and commercialise the kit.
Find out more about her work at https://www.4eyesvision.org/

MTPConnect’s Targeted Translation Research Accelerator (TTRA) program has opened a new funding round to support diabetes and cardiovascular disease research projects that address the unmet health and medical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in rural, remote, regional, and urban centres. 

To develop this Indigenous-specific round, MTPConnect has partnered with the Lowitja Institute to lead the priority setting and ensure the voices of Indigenous communities have been centred in every aspect of the process to determine the health priority areas that will receive research funding. 

To find out more about the application process, project eligibility and selection criteria, listen in to this TTRA Information Session to hear  from MTPConnect's TTRA team – Dr Mana Liao, Dr Erin McAllum and Dr Andionne Parlade, and Lowitja Institute’s Dr Michelle Kennedy, NACCHO’s Christopher Lee, Diabetes Australia’s Deanne Minniecon and AusHSI’s Megan Campbell.  Applications close 28 April 2023.

For this episode we tap into an international perspective on the digital health sector and the business of healthcare.

Lisa Suennen is a US-based entrepreneur and industry advisor. After thirty years in healthcare and seeing little progress in efficiency and optimisation of care, she moved into the digital health space, working as a venture capital investor, speaker and writer. 

Lisa visited Australia recently in her role as Chair of ANDHealth’s Digital Health Investment Advisory Committee. ANDHealth is Australia’s leader provider of accelerator, incubator and commercialisation programs helping to scale digital health technology companies. MTPConnect works closely with ANDHealth through the REDI initiative and the TTRA and CTCM programs.

Lisa joins host Caroline Duell to discuss her views on the development of the Digital Health sector, sharing her expertise as both an investor and advisor.

https://venturevalkyrie.com/

Australian company Minomic has developed the MiCheck Prostate blood test that uses an algorithm, together with other biomarkers, to estimate the risk of a patient having aggressive prostate cancer. The diagnostic overcomes the low accuracy of conventional screening tests to reduce unnecessary intervention such as painful biopsies and improve overall management of the patient. 

The test was launched in the US in 2022, after Minomic was the first to sign up to the 20/20 GeneSystems’ Clinical Lab Innovation Axcellerator (CLIAx) - providing a ‘soft landing’ to help diagnostic test innovators worldwide to substantially reduce the time and cost of launching their tests in the U.S. 

Minomic CEO and Managing Director Dr Brad Walsh joins MTPConnect host Caroline Duell from Sydney to talk about the company’s commercialisation journey and how it launched into the US market after working with urologists around the world during COVID-19. Minomic received funding through Federal Government’s Modern Manufacturing Initiative and is working with Sonic Healthcare to make the test available in Australia. 

MTPConnect’s Targeted Translation Research Accelerator (TTRA) program will open Round 3 of its Research Projects funding opportunity in early 2023 to support diabetes and cardiovascular disease projects that address the unmet health and medical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in rural, remote, regional, and urban centres. 

In anticipation of the round, MTPConnect hosted a webinar to highlight key elements of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research to consider when building research projects and teams.

You will hear from three leading Indigenous researchers, all dedicated to ensuring that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research is conducted by community, for community with a long-lasting impact on health and wellbeing, including Professor Alex Brown, Professor of Indigenous Genomics, The Australian National University and Telethon Kids Institute, Dr Michelle Kennedy, Executive Manager of Research and Knowledge Translation, Lowitja Institute, and Ray Kelly, Accredited Exercise Physiologist/Researcher and creator of ‘Too Deadly for Diabetes’.

It’s World Antimicrobial Awareness Week and this year’s theme is “Preventing Antimicrobial Resistance Together”. We chat to Bugworks, a clinical stage pharmaceutical company, headquartered in the US, with subsidiaries in India and Australia, currently developing novel antibacterials and immunotherapies.

Bugworks’ Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Anand Anandkumar, joins the podcast from Bangalore, India to talk about the challenges of developing new antimicrobials, the boost from CARB-X accelerator that is keeping their lights on, and why push and pull incentives are vital for innovation. Dr Anandkumar reveals why the company chose Adelaide in South Australia as the site for the first-in-human Phase 1 clinical trial of one of two antibacterial agents in development. And we pose the question – does Australia need a CARB-X style accelerator to supercharge its efforts to curb AMR?

Joining host Caroline Duell is Andrew Bowskill, MTPConnect’s Director of Stakeholder Engagement for Queensland and co-chair of the Australian Antimicrobial Resistance Network (AAMRNet), established by MTPConnect as Australia’s first multi-stakeholder expert group formed to address the impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on human health. AAMRNet, in conjunction with CSIRO, recently released the ‘Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Impact Report: How big is Australia's AMR threat?, which reviews gaps in our data collection methods to find out how many people are dying from drug-resistant infections in Australia.