As Australia’s life sciences industry accelerator, MTPConnect’s is backing Australian medical devices of the future through the BioMedTech Horizons Program. It’s a $45 million initiative of the Medical Research Future Fund to bring life-saving medical products from an idea to patients. 

It’s about nurturing medtech companies through the first valley of death and de-risking product development to increase the appeal to private investment.  

The first phase of the program supported 11 companies. And from 2019, a further three rounds awarded $30.3 million in funding to 38 companies. 

The good news is these latest projects have again captured the interest of investors, going on to secure at least $479 million of further flow-on and external investment.
  
With the program wrapping up, we brought these innovators together for the BioMedTech Horizons Finale event in Melbourne and released an Impact report to share their innovation journeys. 

In the second of this two-part special, MTPConnect’s Caroline Duell chats to BioMedTech Horizons Director Elizabeth Stares about how the program is designed to tackle challenges in commercialising early-stage innovations. 

Caroline also catches up with several awardees to find out more about their innovations, including Brendan Fafiani from Cyban, Matt Boustred from ResusRight, Rachel Stirling from Seer Medical, Professor Mark Kendall from WearOptimo, Dr Kyle Berean from Atmo Biosciences, Ashley Zimpel from Cortical Dynamics, Dr Gautam Balasubramanian from Bionics Institute and John Konstantopoulos from Artrya.