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The sun is shining brighter bringing warmer weather. In Auckland, we are looking forward to New Zealand joining the rest of the world out of Covid-19 lockdown, acknowledging that everywhere in the world has been having their own challenges with the virus. Regardless of where we are and what we are doing, take a leaf out of this year’s Mental Health Week Theme in NZ – “Take time to korero” which translates to “Make time to have a chat” – no man is an island and relationships keep us grounded.
With that, here are some highlights from the NZ medtech scene. In late September, Exsurgo announced that its EEG technology for chronic pain management was entering into trials at Waitemata District Health Board with AUT. The technology retrains the brain to deal with pain and is a drug-free alternative for long term pain sufferers. EEG systems are generally expensive but Exsurgo has developed an affordable easy to use system that can be used at home or in clinics.
On the Covid front, Pictor is preparing to roll out its antibody test in NZ before the end of November. The company’s antibody test has been registered in Medsafe’s WAND database for marketing and use in the country. The test, which will be offered by a testing lab in Auckland, is one potential tool to help keep NZ safer as border restrictions are eased. Covid-19 is sadly here to stay but we can manage this through vaccinations, testing and good hygiene regimes.
Kiwi companies HeartLab and JunoFem have both successfully closed million dollar seed rounds to take the next steps in their commercialisation pathways – the former tackling heart care and the latter combating incontinence. Both emerged from the research community and are part of Auckland Bioengineering Institute’s Cloud-9 family of spinouts.
It takes a village to grow a child and similarly, it takes an ecosystem to support new medtech opportunities and help them become sustainable and available for us. This week we are excited to add Te Titoki Mataora MedTech Research Translator to this ecosystem. This is an initiative that helps curates early stage concepts and de-risks them for further funding, creating a pipeline for our pre-Seed funds and Angel investors.
Alongside a contestable fund for research translation, we have a programme to support early and mid-stage career researchers, and build capability in clinical validation and commercialisation. Te Titoki Mataora has an emphasis on technologies that support care and wellbeing in a culturally appropriate manner. The initiative will help form bridges between health technology development and the opportunities that brings, and Māori and Pasifica communities.
In this issue we meet two newcomers to the NZ medtech scene - Zach Warder-Gabaldon and Dea Dauphinee - who have made Christchurch their home. One with a background in medtech and the other a physiotherapist, they both bring a wealth of expertise from their previous lives and are looking for connections. We also welcome Ryl Janssen, the recently appointed CEO of NZ Health IT. We look “under the hood” at Precision Driven Heath (PDH), a programme that has helped build capability in NZ businesses around the application of new data science techniques to gain insights into health and social trends for individuals and cohorts from the massive amounts of data captured by health information systems, consumer devices, social networks and many other sources. We round off this lineup with a great example of the use of data with Noted, an online client management platform for health and social care. Noted breaks down “data silos” and provides “one picture” that helps develop strategies to address areas of development and show outcomes to both organisations and the people they support.
Dr Diana Siew
CMDT Co-Chair
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