In Case You Missed It: Here's What The MTPConnect Team Has Been up to in March

08 April 2022

Sponsoring the National Press Club Address during Science Meets Parliament

Our Chair Sue MacLeman spoke at the National Press Club ahead of Professor Mark Hutchinson, the new President at Science & Technology Australia who made the Address titled ‘Taking Australian science from lab bench to boardroom’ to create companies, jobs and products. MTPConnect also hosted a table of guests from the sector for the event. Professor Hutchinson and STA CEO Misha Schubert joined Interim CEO Stuart Dignam on the podcast the following week to discuss the issues in more depth.

MTPConnect Meets Up with BioNTech Team in Sydney

Senior representatives of BioNTech, the company behind Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, have been in Australia recently. MTPConnect Board Director, Julie Phillips, and our Director of Stakeholder Engagement for NSW & SA, Dr Duncan Macinnis, met with BioNTech's Chief Operating Officer Dr Sierk Poetting and Dr Oliver Hennig, the company’s SVP Operations and Managing Director BioNTech Manufacturing.

UK Ignite: Medical Innovation Summit

MTPConnect Chair Sue MacLeman and Interim CEO Stuart Dignam presented at two sessions of the virtual Ignite Summit, an executive level summit for leaders across sectors to meet and positively impact medical innovation through a series of debates. This year, the UK summit focused on how the UK’s health science community can best support a national and international effort to tackle bio-emergencies.

Tracking Health Innovations on the MTPConnect Podcast

In the first face-to-face podcast interview since January 2020, we spoke with Dr Mat McGann, co-founder and CEO of Health Horizon, a health innovation tracking and discovery platform - making it easy to follow the progress of medical innovations around the world. MTPConnect supported Health Horizon's development through the Growth Centre Project Fund in 2017. Co-hosts Caroline Duell and Elizabeth Stares check in on the company’s commercialisation journey in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic - with 4,000 users tracking 6,000 innovation activities around the world. Check out www.healthhorizon.com.

CTCM Program Closes Round 1

The $19.75 million Clinical Translation and Commercialisation - Medtech (CTCM) program closed its first round on 11 March, and applications are under review. The program is focused on Australian small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and aims to boost commercialisation of home-grown medical products with funding of between $250,000 and $1.5 million per project across two funding rounds (FY2022 and FY2023).

WA Life Sciences Innovation Hub Spotlights Emyria

It was another great conversation in Perth this month with Emyria Managing Director Dr Michael Winlo discussing the journey, learnings, and business strategies of the company in conversation with MTPConnect’s Director Stakeholder Engagement WA Dr Tracey Wilkinson. Dr Winlo spoke to the audience at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research about real-world evidence in drug development and the medicinal cannabis industry.

ACannabis Conference

MTPConnect supported the ACannabis Conference, "Bridging the gap: evidence, confidence, access", held in Melbourne. Our Director Stakeholder Engagement NSW & ACT Dr Duncan Macinnis joined a panel discussion Industry Update on Day 1 of the conference, providing an overview of MTPConnect’s Medicinal Cannabis Industry report first released late in 2021.

MTPConnect’s Communications Team Expands

We welcomed two new members of the Communications team - Deborah Sippitts as Senior Manager Communications and Natalie Vella as Social Media Specialist - joining Caroline Duell and Libby Pearce, based in Melbourne.

Melbourne Office Move

After moving from the Cremorne office in late February, the team has now re-located to a new office in Brighton.