Early-Stage Innovation Forum
The Early-Stage Innovation Forum encourages, recognises and rewards some of Australian life sciences’ most promising early-stage technology and projects and has been running at AusBiotech’s premier annual conference, the AusBiotech conference, since 2018 and AusMedtech, Australia’s leading medical technology conference, since 2021.
The Forum features quick-pitch presentations to a panel of industry experts, giving applicants the opportunity to gather valuable feedback that will help them to commercialise their projects and technologies, and is one aspect of AusBiotech’s work in empowering start-ups and SMEs during their commercialisation journey.
Expert panellists include representatives from international big pharma, corporate venture capitalists and early-stage investors, with pitches coming from local research institutes, universities, hospitals and pre-series A companies in the areas of medical devices and diagnostics, therapeutics, digital health and enabling technologies.
2024
- AusMedtech 2024: Dr Joseph Ischia, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, JiffyStent, for his pitch on the JiffyStent Inserter (JSI), a Class 1 medical device for the management of kidney stone pain. The JSI is a ureteral stent inserter designed for safe, swift, and secure stent placement, with the aim of providing a more effecient and cost-effective intervention for the treatment of acute renal colic due to kidney stone obstruction.
2023
- AusBiotech 2023: Associate Professor Michelle Wykes, QIMR Berghofer and Fovero Therapeutics, for her pitch on a proprietary Galectin-9 pipeline to treat IO resistance in solid tumours; Dr Craig Macintosh, Murdoch University, for his presentation on a personalised medicine for familial hypercholesterolemia patients’ mutations in the low density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) gene. Thank you to the sponsor Sanofi for their support.
- AusMedtech 2023: Associate Professor Michelle Hill, Group Leader, QIMR Berghofer Precision & Systems Biomedicine Laboratory – for her pitch on ' new ovarian cancer blood tests'. A/Prof Hill presented a novel glycosylation-focused proteomics platform to examine blood protein glycosylation changes known to occur during cancer development. Initial findings were published in Proteomics Clinical Applications in April 2023, highlighting the technology’s potential as an early-stage diagnostic tool in ovarian cancer.
2022
- AusMedtech 2022: Ricardo Garcia-Rosas, Co-founder and CEO, Virtetic – for his pitch on ‘Game-based virtual reality therapeutics’. Mojtaba (MJ) Golzan from the University of Technology Sydney was given a special mention for his pitch on the medical device A-Eye. MJ secured a fast-tracked application into Medtech Actuator’s Origin accelerator. This event was supported by Davies Collison Cave.
- AusBiotech 2022: Dr Melissa Knight from Knight Life Consulting representing QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute for her pitch on Prof Rajiv Khanna and Dr Paulo Martins’ off-the-shelf CMV EphA3 CAR T cell therapy; Jonathan Bernardini from WEHI for his presentation of BioTACs, the next generation of Cell-Surface Targeted Protein Degraders.
2021
- AusBiotech 2021: Dr Yvonne Booth, Senior Associate, Commercialisation – Life Sciences, UniQuest for her pitch on ‘Anti-CDCP1: a new molecularly targeted radiotheranostic for ovarian cancer. Special thanks to the sponsor, CAI, for their support.
- AusMedtech 2021: Rosie Stramandinoli, Head of Commercial and Intellectual Property, Nutromics’ for her pitch on the company’s wearable Continuous Molecular Monitoring (CMM) platform. Thanks to Medtronic ANZ for supporting AusMedtech 2021’s Early-Stage Innovation Forum in its inaugural year.
2020
- AusBiotech 2020: Dr Tamsin Terry from Uniquest for her pitch on ‘Octapeptin X – a novel antibiotic for Gram-negative bacterial infections’. Thank you to the sponsor, BioCurate, for their support.
2019
- AusBiotech 2019: Malcolm Hebblewhite, CEO, Atmo Biosciences was awarded ‘Best Translational Research’ on his pitch to commercialise a world-first ingestible gas-sensing capsule technology developed at RMIT, Monash University and Alfred Health.
2018
- AusBiotech 2018: The inaugural event did not include a competition, and was supported by the Queensland Government.