What the 2018 Dean's Innovation Grants winners say about the Dean's Innovation Grants

Laura Downie

A brief background about your project in the Dean’s Innovation Grant? 

About 40% of adults seek eye care with generic symptoms of eye discomfort that may or may not be due to dry eye disease. Currently, there is no single diagnostic device for accurate and efficient triaging of patients with ocular discomfort symptoms. Instead, clinicians must rely on a battery of tests that are time consuming, suffer from poor precision, and are invasive for patients.

Our technology, ADMiER, is unique, providing a one-step, point-of-care test to rapidly and accurately diagnose dry eye. The device is a transformative advance over traditional techniques and we foresee it becoming the “go to” tear film diagnostic for eye care clinicians. Societal benefit will result from more efficient patient triaging (with time savings for clinicians and economic gains relating to reduced healthcare costs). And patients will benefit from enhanced diagnosis, as this will lead to more well informed dry eye treatment, leading to improved health outcomes.

How did the Dean’s Innovation Grant help with your research?

The funding from the Dean’s Innovation grant has been invaluable for furthering the development of our diagnostic device, and has supported a comprehensive verification study investigating the effects of key operational factors (such as temperature and sample size) on the device’s measurement accuracy. This project has substantially extended our previous work, which has included a clinical validation study supporting the merit of our approach for identifying dry eye disease. Importantly, the project was fully scoped in consultation with industry, and is a critical pre-commercialisation step, essential to furthering this technology along the development pipeline.

In addition to the grant itself, through the award of the Dean’s Innovation Grant, I am currently leading my team’s involvement in the inaugural University of Melbourne - Stanford SPARK program for biomedical research translation. This milestone-based program has provided a wealth of mentoring and networking opportunities, which are supporting the ongoing commercial development of our technology.

What advice would you give to early career researchers?

I strongly encourage early-career researchers to apply for the Dean’s Innovation Grant. The Shark-tank style pitching event provided an opportunity to meet University leaders in innovation and enterprise, who are inspiring in terms of their achievements in commercialisation and have generously offered their insight and mentorship. For me, this award has opened up many opportunities for collaboration, industry engagement and networking, both within and beyond the Faculty. It is a wonderful initiative that encourages innovation and translation, to impact healthcare and ultimately deliver benefits to patients.

Brendan Chua

A brief background about your project in the Dean’s Innovation Grant?

We all know the impact that seasonal influenza, more commonly known as “the flu”, can have on our health and productivity and how important it is to get vaccinated every year. We also know that the efficacies of flu vaccines can vary from year to year; they work best when well-matched to circulating flu strains but offer little or no benefit when this isn’t the case.  What I am currently working on is developing a new prophylactic treatment that when used as an additive to a flu vaccine, can improve vaccine efficacy in ways that will offer better protection when we don’t get these matches right.

How did the Dean’s Innovation Grant help with your research? 

All of our proof-of-concept studies were previously only demonstrated using small animal models but the Dean’s Innovation Grant has now provided us with funding to evaluate this treatment in a more relevant industry-accepted model. Successful outcomes from this work will form a stepping stone for attracting investment from interested industry partners to further develop this approach. The initiative has also us provided us with the necessary support, extensive mentorship and education to help drive the translation and commercialisation of our work through the SPARK Melbourne program.

What advice would you give to early career researchers?

Mentors have been very important to me throughout my research career. There is much to be gained by reaching out and learning from the extensive experience of those who are experts in their respective fields and successful in their pursuits. Think beyond the box and keep in mind the big picture question; “what is the significance of this work and how will this be useful”.

Matias Maturana

A brief background about your project in the Dean’s Innovation Grant?

Our company pitch was about a neural implant we have designed that is capable of interfacing with single neurons in the brain. We are using this device to record high resolution neural activity for seizure prediction in epilepsy.

How did the Dean’s Innovation Grant help with your research?

The funding from the grant has helped with purchasing some necessary equipment. But more importantly, it has given us access to the SPARK program that has begun here in Australia. SPARK is a startup program that provides mentorship for companies like ours.

What advice would you give to early career researchers?

Advice about the Deans innovation grant: Pitch your company, not just your research. Make sure you can articulate the problem in lay terms and you know the market opportunity.