 Welcome to the Australian National University this evening. Before we start, I'd like to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet tonight. Pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging. It's great to see so many of you around. We have many distinguished guests, colleagues and friends of tonight's inaugural address by the Vice Chancellor's Entrepreneurial Professor Mark Kindle. And we're very delighted that so many were able to come and some from quite a considerable distance. I'm also particularly pleased that we have ACT Health Minister Megan Fitzera's back. So welcome. Mark has brought family, Faith and Luca Kindle here. So welcome down wherever I've seen you enter, but there we go. And I do hope that your whole family's had good fun. You've been over at one of my favorite places, Questacon, and you have done something I've never done, which is the free fall exhibit, which I find too scary to do. I have acrophobia, it's terrible. So one of the things at ANU is, as Australia's National University, we have a responsibility and obligation to be a global resource of policy and ideas that help to improve lives and make the world, we hope, a better place. And to do this, there's many things we can do, but one thing we've been working on is to break down the barriers between ANU and those who can use our research to achieve these aims, whether they are in business and government or in the not-for-profit sector. So one of the ways we've been trying to do this is our entrepreneurial schemes. And the scheme is facilitating, driving, and developing interdisciplinary research areas across the university to identify new approaches to significant research and innovation challenges, and we hope to drive our cultural change in academia. For too long, those who have done this, and there have been a few, and a few here I see tonight, have perhaps not received the plots that they should from the university, the support they should have, and yet they managed to soldier on, and we're trying to make that a regular part of the university. The first appointment under the scheme was Professor Genevieve Bell, one of the world's foremost technologists and public intellectuals, and I'm very proud to introduce to you tonight Professor Mark Kendall, the second appointment under this scheme. Now, Australia's medical research community is world-class. Professor Kendall's work is at the cutting edge of new wearable medical devices. Professor Kendall is a genuine rocket scientist. His PhD is in hypervelocity aerodynamics, and at the University of Oxford, he was an inventor of biolistics technology, that is, ballistic in the biology sphere, and the inventions he contributed were commercialized with PowderMed, which was purchased by Pfizer for $400 million in 2006. Professor Kendall came back to Queensland under Peter Beattie Government Smart State Initiative, which was designed to develop the state's knowledge economy. And in Queensland, he invented the Nanopatch, which was commercialized in 2011 through the company he founded, Vaxis, and the Nanopatch is a next generation vaccine delivery platform, and it was able to deliver vaccines in a hundredth of the normal dose without the need for refrigeration. You can imagine that is a very significant development for developing countries where consistent refrigeration from point of production through storage and delivery to communities is often a fundamental barrier to the safe and effective supply of vaccines. Now, I personally met Mark when he was at UQ through our interactions at the World Economic Forum, and his work there on the Global Future Council for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. As I recall, we were thinking about existential risk for humanity and basically, you know, the 10 best ways that humanity will do itself in over the coming hundred years. A really uplifting conversation in Davos, I can tell you, but we had all the right people in the audience talking about humanity's doom and gloom. His genuine desire to improve the lives of people across the globe through medical innovation was inspiring, and I was talking to him back then about, I didn't know I was gonna be vice chancellor then, so I was just talking to him at that point, and then about a year and a half later, we talked about how we might try to do things a little differently, and I was pretty open to anything that we thought might work, and was able to eventually encourage him to join us here at ANU as part of what is an experiment. Now, the technology Professor Kendall works on will have, we hope, far-reaching implications for our health and well-being into the future. He's working on a simple wearable devices that will provide a form of personalized medicine. These micro wearables could provide personalized diagnostics across a whole suite of diseases, and these will be minimally invasive, pain-free health monitoring, which you can imagine, could really change the way we administer health. Professor Kendall's company, Wear Optimo, is working on devices that range from low-cost disposable devices for shirt duration measurements through integration to the next generation smartwatches for continuous monitoring and precision health. And like any good company, it's got a great new logo, which I take to be Australia turned on, or at least the potential of turning Australia on, which is all what this company's about from my perspective. But just imagine a world where blood tests and other pathology are no longer routine because your micro wearable is doing it all the time and is able to put the information to your GP or your health professional. So it sounds a bit like science fiction, but this really is a potential new reality. And so it is now an honor for me to welcome Professor Mark Kendall to the stage. Mark? So thank you for the warm introduction. That's a real honor to be here today. Firstly, I'd just like to thank people who have really come from long distances as well as short distances to be here. Now, we've got a few things I'd like to try and cover off today. As Brian said, it is an experiment that we're running. And the title of my presentation talks about a future to do with the fourth industrial revolution and health care. And this idea, this experiment of wear optimal that we're launching effectively tonight. First a little bit about who I am. So I'm a biomedical engineer and I love producing medical devices of substance that can make a difference in humanity. Brian's kind by saying I'm a rocket scientist. Let's just say I'm a non-practicing one. It's been a long time since I've been doing that. But today I'm going to be talking a little bit about how we got here. So there's three things. How we got here, what we're doing now, and what we're looking to do in the future. So it's a very simple structure. Now, first up, you never know what you need to know. And I had no idea I'd end up in medicine at all. In fact, I was going to go in a completely different direction. It was to continue working on rockets. But a two minute conversation changed everything for me. And it was a meta, an Englishman, and I won't try and mimic his accent. But he said, I really enjoyed your presentation. I was at a conference with him. And I've got this idea to use rockets to fire vaccines into the skin, which I like to come and work with me. This was more than 20 years ago now, just at the end of my PhD. And I thought, that sounds interesting. OK. Where is it? And he said it's Oxford University. And I said, well, I get a chance to row. And he said, if you're good enough. So three months later, we were there. And it was an amazing experience for us. So there's all the things you'd expect about a place like Oxford. The cold, the old teaching rooms, and all of those sorts of things. The academic excellence, that was clearly there. But one of the big surprises for me was learning. It turned out to be an eight-year apprenticeship in innovation. So it turns out, working with this thing, Brian mentioned science fiction before. Well, this is very much inspired. I'm happy to pass this around. Very much inspired by Star Trek. So the device, well, this is a kind of physical embodiment of something like that. But there's a bit more of a kick to it. It's a supersonic device that fired particles into the skin of 1,500 miles an hour. Gold microparticle, small ones. So there's no pain free. So I'm happy to pass that around. It's not a loaded gun. You can take a look at it. And what did we learn from this? Well, so many different things. Learned how to patent ideas, how to work in interdisciplinary teams, how to keep true to the science as well. Because in the end, that's one of the most important things. How to commercialize, how to work with companies as well. So that, for me, was very important in shaping who I am today. And that was quite some time ago. Now, looking ahead, there was, Brian mentioned Peter Beattie. So in the early 2000s, the Smart State Initiative was pushing ahead in leaps and bounds. And I was convinced to leave Oxford and go to the University of Queensland. One of the new research institutes there called the ARBM. And I had an idea in my back pocket called the nanopatch. And it was an amazing adventure to take that forward, to turn that idea into something real and do it within the Australian context. So explaining the nanopatch briefly, unlike the gene gun which is over there, that's another name for it, the biolistics. Brian rightly identified as the combination of biology and ballistics. I should back up by talking about the problem we're trying to solve. So Bill Gates put out a call for better vaccines for the developing world. And I sat down in my office there in Oxford trying to make it work, make the gene gun work. And it wouldn't. It was too complicated, too expensive, and a bunch of other problems. A little aside, by the way, biology. So you think rocket science is harder than it is. And biology is harder, at least for me. Because the biological variability is humbling. You think you've nailed something and then something comes and you have no idea of no explanation for its biological variability. And within this particular narrative, yes, the rocket was hard and my job was to start with a rocket, but it turned out that the real challenges were in the skin. The biology of the skin, the immunology of the skin. And I had to start getting a handle of that and learning it. And that was not easy. So it turned out the gene gun wouldn't work for the developing world. So that was a problem. And I thought, well, what am I going to do? So I sat down and thought, OK, well, here's what we now know about the skin, map the skin's immune system with some great immunologists over there at Oxford. And designed a device from the ground up to try and place vaccine to the cells in the skin that tend to matter for improved vaccines. It's called an antipatch. And unlike the big device that I just passed around, this is an example of a nanopatch. And you can immediately see it's a lot smaller. But also unlike the device I passed around, which is taking something from aerospace and putting it into biology. In some ways, this was taking something from Silicon Valley and putting it into biology. So this is a silicon chip. So I needed to find ways to make this work and a silicon chip turned out to be the case. So again, happy to pass the nanopatch around. What we see here is an example of a nanopatch compared to a needle. And in this particular case, it's a device for the mouse. There's 4,000 projections on that particular device. And you apply the patch to the skin. You dry coat vaccines to it. And the vaccine is released and released quickly and targets those key immune cells. And this is a close-up of what it looks like when one of these types of devices is applied to the skin. And it looks like a cartoon. It's a pretty image. But it's not. It's real data. It's a scanning electron micrograph. This speaks for itself. This is one of the projections from one of our devices. The layer in red at the top is dead skin. It's astralum corneum. The brown is the viadermis. And the purple is the dermis. So we've turned the cells of interest in this particular image. If I try to sum up, in one image, I suppose, 20 years of work, this wouldn't be too far off the mark, it's interfacing with the skin in functional ways as opposed to just producing a medical widget and then trying to find a use for it. We study the interface, the physiology of the skin, and design fit-for-purpose devices in order to meet that particular need. And if you're wondering what drives me, this is a good image for that. So this is taken a little while ago now. It's when we went to Papua New Guinea for a usability study with the nanopatch. And it's the global health narrative. It's getting these devices out into the field. In this particular case, we're at Port Moresby with the practitioners. They're getting these nanopatches. In this particular case, it was mock-ups of them. But in the hands of the practitioners and learning about what happens in the field and feeding them back into our devices to make them work better. So perhaps being infected by my days in Oxford in 2010, 2011, the data looked strong and compelling using CSL's influenza vaccine called FluVax, trivalent at that time, now quadrivalent. And so we're faced with a fork in the road. Well, do we continue on the academic line or do we actually take the leap and try to turn this into something real as in the form of a company? So we did the latter. I founded a company called Vaxus and ran an interesting experiment for about four years. And so the experiment was to be a full-time professor at the University of Queensland and effectively a full-time executive in Vaxus. So let's just say it stretched my Protestant work ethic a little bit and learned a lot in that period of time. And so Vaxus is still going forward and it's in the clinic and taking things forward on that front. But I stepped out from that, which brings us on to where we are today. So that's a little bit of a background in a few slides, trying to compress 20 years of my life from a technical point of view at least. Then I noticed something. I did a sabbatical at Harvard in 2015. Around the time I saw Brian started working with the World Economic Forum. And then it's interesting you develop an instinct for something and you think, okay, there's something here and you can't even fight it. It just sort of pulls you in. And so a little survey, I suppose. So first, is anyone wearing a Fitbit device? If you don't want to admit it, that's okay. So there's a few. Faith, thank you for wearing a Fitbit. She'll hate me for saying that. And anyone wearing an Apple Watch? Okay, where's Luca? Luca should be wearing an Apple Watch. I'm not doing this on purpose with them. So that's probably what we think about when we think about wearable devices. Another little survey since I'm at it is who thinks I know a lot about the Fourth Industrial Revolution? Okay, there's a few people just really nudging. Okay, so I want to just take a little moment to cover off these two things and talk about the context of wear optimal and why are we doing what we're doing? Why are we running this particular experiment? So how about we start with... Let's start with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Okay, so to describe the Fourth, we've got to talk about the first three. Okay, so most of us, when we think about the Industrial Revolution, we're talking about the first one, and that's very much characterised by mechanical things. So steam engines is one great example of that. Primarily at its zenith, it was in the 1800s, and it took a long time for it to roll out around the world, and it didn't really achieve its full reach. Massive changes, though, that came with the First Industrial Revolution, including, it could be argued, the founding of Australia from a European perspective, but we'll save that for another day. Second Industrial Revolution, primarily electrical, okay, and the champions for that were not people like Brunel in the UK, but there was a lot of the champions for that were in the US. And so we're talking about people like Edison, we're talking about the telephone, the telegraph, but also manufacturing. As we think of manufacturing, it's in the Second Industrial Revolution, so you could argue that the fabrication of Ford motorcars with Henry Ford, Second Industrial Revolution. Now the third, looking around the room, it's very much in our lifetime. So it's a digital computer revolution, okay, and we can look around and see great examples of that. Of course, most of us would have one of these, or something like that. That's a great embodiment. I meant to turn this off, Sue had asked me to do that. So anyway, don't call me. So that's one example of what took place and is taking place in the Third Industrial Revolution, the internet, computers, transistor radios, and it's happening very quickly, faster than the other two. And who are the champions of that? Companies like Google, companies like Apple, and so on. And they've really created a revolution. I mean, here's just one example. If someone said to me, I'll be here in 2018 talking about a company that's only 20 years old, yeah, with an R&D budget that is bigger than all of Australia's, I wouldn't believe you. But that's Google, okay, and that's a snapshot of some of the things that are taking place. But that's the third Industrial Revolution. So what's the fourth? So working with the World Economic Forum, I learned a little bit about this because it's a key topic of the forum. Now the fourth is a whole bunch of different fields taking off at the same time. So the third is very much digital. And the fourth will include that embodiment, the internet of things that's estimated that something like a trillion devices will be connected to the internet within a few years. That's just one example. To me, that seems obvious, okay? But there's other ones. There's always other fields taking off at the same time. We have artificial intelligence. We have genomics. We have other forms of biotechnology, nanotechnology. They're all taking off at the same time. And the question is what's going to happen when all of those things, how do those things come together? And how do we handle that? How do we train people to get their head around that kind of thing? Is it possible that the ability to make things can actually outstrip our imagination now has usually been the reverse? So that's an interesting idea. Now, let's bring it into healthcare now. So the Fourth Industrial Revolution in healthcare, of course, another way of talking about this is great examples of personalized medicine and digital health. Now, I'd now like to come in to talk about the wearables thing, because I've talked about the Fitbit and the Apple Watch. That's really what we think about when we think about a wearable device. And there's great reasons for that. But they're not really functional medical devices yet. Yet, that is. But right in front of our eyes, we can see that there's a march up the value chain where soon wearable devices in a wide, kind of widespread way will be functional medical devices. And this field is like nothing I've ever seen before. So let me explain what I mean by that. So the first is, so the gene gun, if someone can hold up wherever that is, it's over here, and the nanopatch, wherever that is in the room, harder to see, it's up the back. Okay, they're both examples of an industry that's been around for a very long time. It's the pharmaceutical industry. It's a mature industry. And I try to fight this, and I've tried it in many different ways, but it seems to always come back to this. But when you succeed in this industry, it takes 15 years to go from my dear to product. It's a 15-year ride. So in Fraser's narrative, which includes CSL and includes Merck and others, from my dear to product, it was about 15 years. And we can debate the reasons why, but a lot of it is just the nature of the industry, the nature of the regulatory hurdles and so on. But that's what it is. But what's happening in this wearable space is, yeah, it's like nothing I've ever seen before. Its epicenter is not the traditional pharmaceutical industry. It's coming out of places like Silicon Valley. It's coming out of places like Google. And unlike the pharma industry where it kind of comes from this methodical blockstep approach, the culture is very, very different. The culture of people that can produce billion-dollar companies from their backyard or their garage don't have the background of working with regulatory authorities. And so there's a culture clash that's coming. But also on top of that, they're extremely well capitalized as well. So one of the likely epicenters of this is Silicon Valley. So why are we here in Australia and why are we talking about it? And what's where Optimo got to do with any of this? So Brian and I have been talking for a little while and Brian came on as Vice Chancellor. And he wants to get some big things done in innovation and try to change the way we do things as well. We don't need necessarily always more of the same. Now in the context of what we're talking about here, I could, I'll talk about micro wearables in a moment, but that's the core idea and the ability to gain access to the skin for all manner of signals. So I could try to do it the way that I've done it before, working within the classic pharma context where it will take 15 years, write some research grants, hopefully win a few with the ARCO and or the NHMRC, and after X amount of years have some feasibility data and then try to set up a company and take it forward. And if you succeed, that might be a 15 year ride. Now of course, other than the fact that I'll be extremely old man by the time that gets done, so I'm not a big fan of that, but it's actually wouldn't work in this space because in the meantime, unlike this field which is moving at the speed of sound, this other field is moving at the speed of light. So what do we do about it? Well, one option is I could sit back and watch it unfold kind of like a spectator in the grandstands eating the popcorn and write about it. Try to do it the way I've done it before, but I'm convinced that it wouldn't work. Or we could set up a fit for purpose enterprise that's well capitalized, a biotechnology skunkworks, and I'll talk about what that means in a moment, where we're focused, we have the backing of ANU, we work really close to within it, but we're not tied under all of the layers that you can tend to sometimes happen in an academic context. And just as a little aside, one of the outcomes from the World Economic Forum is they're arguing that the universities are going the wrong way. And I know that might not be a PC audience, a thing for me to talk about in this audience today, but what they're saying is that we're getting caught up in our metrics so much that it's forcing us to do incremental research and we end up getting caught in a machine where it's the papers leading to a grant leading to the papers. What we're about is trying to really change the way things get done and produce impact. So that's why we've came up with this framework for Optomo. It's a company. The idea is for it to be very well capitalized. The idea is for it to be entirely focused. A top team of really bright people, not required to write papers, of course, when we choose to, but focus on global health care impact. So that's the core vision. Now, let's talk about what we're actually doing. So this is a little snapshot of where we are today and it's the look forward. And this is an example of one of our micro-wearable embodiments and another one as well. So this is a single-use disposable type device and this is something longer term. So what big problems are we going to try and tackle or be focused on? And how are we going to make this worthwhile? So here's one example. Now, there is a bit of a backstory to this and I'll share it with you. We did think about doing this as a live experiment here today and the only thing holding us back was the Wi-Fi here might be a little bit shaky, otherwise we would have given it a go. So this is something I had tested just a day or two ago. So what are we looking at here? So firstly, this is one example of micro-wearables. It's gaining access to the skin very, very shallowly for a fit-for-purpose signal. And in this particular case, I'm about to play a movie in a moment. But this particular case, it's a simple electronic measurement called ECG, which is to give you a readout of how your heart is performing. And it's a field that's been around for a while, but it's still a field that you can get wrong in many different ways. Now, what most other techs have is this kind of stuff. It's called noise. Well, this is a kind of clean signal that you can generate with one of our types of micro-wearables that are applied to the skin. So that's just one simple example. And it's a stepping stone application. It's not the one that excites me the most. Now, the one that, well, there's a few that excite me, that really grabs my attention is, what if we can generate signals like that, that are continuous, that pick up and detect a heart attack as it's about to happen? Okay? Now, to do that, you need to gain access to all manner of biomarkers, in particular one called troponin. And we think we have an approach with our micro-wearables to do that. Why do this? Well, it's the biggest killer on the planet. So it's not infectious disease. There's 14 million deaths per year due to infectious disease. That is a big problem. There's no doubt. But today's, one of today's biggest problems is cardiovascular disease, and it is the biggest killer. And even in this year, in 2018, people can drop dead from a heart attack with no warning. And this is an interesting going full circle now as well. It's going back to my mechanical engineering roots. Because have a look at cars today. So cars, a high level car, I was told today by someone within the industry might have about 2,000 sensors within it. Okay? A standard car may have about 200 sensors within it, but it's detecting things all the time and you get to find out how your car is working. Can any of you guess how many signals that are produced by sensors on the human body for medical, regular medical use? Pretty much none, actually, when you think about it. We have to wait until something goes wrong, then go to the hospital setting and then get wired up. And it's an event, it's an acute event at that point. And when we look at some of the lifestyle diseases, I don't want to sound negative here, but quite a lot of ticking time bombs are taking place with diabetes and so on. If we can continuously monitor in those sorts of areas, we can get early insights into that and help shape the behaviour. So, that's one snapshot of where we are today. We have many more that we're working on. We're really excited about this experiment that we're running. I'm excited about it being so interdisciplinary. That will be hard, but I kind of like that challenge as well. We will need to work with all manner of people, not only within the team, but it needs to be extremely collaborative, not only here in Canberra, not only in Australia, but also around the world. We're talking about the need for artificial intelligence, knowledge, digital health, human interface knowledge, psychology as well, human factors. And of course I've been dodging some of the sharp stuff that we're working on right now. So the dermatology, the physical chemistry, the electrical engineering, all of those things. And I'd like to just finish with something brief. I talked about 15 years. So, earlier this year, my Oxford mentor, one that talked me into going to Oxford, he died. And there was a reunion for that. And we went back to Oxford, and that was a really touching experience. But I looked around the room, the people that I worked with, with that powderject experience, and what they're doing now is amazing. It's humbling. So the first PhD student that I had the privilege to supervise, he's now leading a company there in Oxfordshire with about a billion dollars and producing tuberculosis tests that are being produced, distributed around the world. And that's just one example. Now, let's look ahead 15 years. So first for the record, I don't want to be dead. But what does success look like from running this experiment? Well, first, we of course would like to have an impact with our devices being out there and in use. One of the reasons why it needs to be a company as opposed to a knock for profit is that actually to make an impact, you need to be commercial. So that's the first. But the second is I'm really hopeful that the younger people, in particular that come and work with us and come through and get that kind of infection that I had over there in Oxford, they're doing something like this 15 years down the line. Whatever it is, I can't even predict what it is. And I really hope I've got nothing against Oxfordshire, I really hope that a good slice of those will be doing that here in Australia. And if we've done that through the innovation by doing and teaching, then I think we've done the job and we've got a lot to be happy with. So on that note, I'd like to finish. Again, thank you so much for coming today. It's a real pleasure to see you. And I believe in the spirit of conversation you'll have the opportunity to ask questions and put Brian and I in the hot seat. So thank you. Thank you, Mark. So I'm going to lead a couple questions and then we'll open up to Q&A at the end. So I guess one of the first things to think about is you're someone who started in Australia, went overseas, did very well in Oxford, and you came back. So do you see that notion of brain drain being a problem for Australia? And I guess what was the reason ultimately, other than Peter Beattie, that you've decided to stay in Australia, which is not a common occurrence for entrepreneurial people like yourself? Great question. So people do talk about the brain drain a lot and it does happen, right? It's a real thing. But there's also a brain gain from going abroad. And it cuts both ways as well. Bringing people into here and having multinational labs, I think it's a fantastic thing. So for me personally, I learned a lot from that experience and was able to transplant some of those learnings back to here. And there's so many ways it opens up your thinking. I remember as one example, when we were building Baxus and we were putting together the Series A investment and I drew up the budget for what we should do. It was a $15 million budget. And the people around me, the TTO, said, you can't do that. And I said, well, why not? And they said, that hasn't been done in Australia. And I said, well, we kind of did it in Oxford. Let's give it a go. So I think it's good in opening up your thinking. So play the long game is probably my answer. Yes, some people will end up in England or wherever. But a whole bunch of people end up here too. And I think that's a good thing. And you found working in Australia compared to Oxford. I mean, how have you found it? What are the challenges you've found working in Australia? And what are the opportunities you've found working in Australia? Look, I miss, on the challenger side, I miss the feeling of being close to everything. And the reality of that too. If you needed to go across to a meeting somewhere in continental Europe, you can do that as a day trip. And things flowing through there so much. Here, it's kind of the destination people aren't passing through. So I miss that. But what I like about here is I think we're developing our own Australian way of doing things. So yes, we're used to being resource constrained, but we kind of have an optimistic approach of tackling things. And there is an upside to being left alone for a while. So you can work things up, and then you can choose to put it out by your choosing. But yes, and you know this better than anyone, Brian, the long distance flights are pretty tough. You need a good skill set to be able to work on that. Absolutely. Yes, I caught up on various box sets yesterday coming back from San Francisco. So one of the experimental aspects of this is really trying to embed a culture of entrepreneurialism. You said you got an apprenticeship for eight years. So how do you see that working here? Well, so you can study innovation and you can read about it and you could maybe attend a course for a week and all those things are useful. My observation though is nothing like doing it. So our strategy here with WorldTomo is to have a kind of an approach where all manner of people can flow in and be part of it. So say you're an academic here at A&U and you'd like it as a common for a taste of this. We want to allow that to happen. Although of course we can collaborate as well with you still within the university, that's fine. In terms of students as well coming through, a PhD that is nothing wrong with a PhD. It's a great thing, but of course I'm biased. I'm a product of that. But we all know that very few PhDs will lead to the academic path. And if we can provide an early taste for PhD students where they get an industry component by coming in and working with us, that can only help in that space. So I guess one of the things that people on this when you didn't really talk too much about it is there are a lot of people around the world working in the space. We now talk about Apple Watches in the beginning. We've talked about Google. So what is your point of difference going to be? So I'm going to take the classic Australian minister. We're not any good. We suck. Everyone's going to run us over. Why are we even bothering trying? Sorry to be a little negative. To be clear, I've yet to meet a minister that said that to me directly. You've got to know how to compete. So my observation of this field of wearable devices is, as I mentioned, they're toys. And people are doing the obvious things. They're putting a device on the skin and trying to hear stuff. Now the skin's an amazing organ, and it's a wall. A good way to look at it is a wall. It keeps the bad stuff out, the good stuff in. You can listen on the wall, and that's what Apple are doing, that's what others are doing. What do you hear? We hear very few things, and the things you do here, you don't hear very well. Now, it just turns out, I've been working for 20 years with the skin, with functional medical devices, looking at the physiology of the skin, and we have the ability to gain access very shallowly into the skin for all manner of signals that you can't get on the surface. So it's that unique knowledge base that we're putting to work, plus the ability to, having done it before, once or twice, to actually put it together and make it happen as well. So I think that's the summary. All right, well, let's open it up to questions from the audience. Anything goes, with a reason. We'll start up there, sir, in the darkness. Please, ask your question. Thank you very much. We're gonna give you a microphone if that's all right. We're recording this, so we wanna make sure everyone can hear the question. Thank you very much for the presentation. Just towards the end of your presentation, you said that to be successful, it's got to be commercial. And so my question is about that, because I'm just wondering who is going to benefit in terms of the recipients from all of this new technology in the health field. I would like to think that many people in the developing countries would be the main recipients. And there are examples. For example, Lixill, that produced the bio-toilet and is in the process of distributing 100 million at next to no cost to the purchaser, would be the way to go with something like this, because we'd like to assess the health of everybody. Is there an equal chance for everyone in your agenda? So let's start with the commercial comment, and I'll come on to the others. So providing a little bit more context on that, what I'm talking about is providing a route towards impact. So if we didn't go commercial and did fundamental research there, there was absolutely nothing wrong with that, and a lot of fundamental research. But the question is, how does that work get taken forward to produce the functional devices that can actually be used by people in the setting for genuine health care? And so where we're positioning, where OXMO is to help make that happen, and that doesn't preclude any of the things you talked about. So I'm hugely passionate and always have been about the developing world applications. It's one of the reasons why I invented the nanopatch was to meet that particular need. And I'm keen to leapfrog the typical technology process, which is, so if you use a car analogy, there's a technology that ends up, starts in Formula One, a supercar, Mercedes, and then eventually it'll end up in a day-to-day car, but that's a trickle down that that tends to happen. I'm keen to try and leapfrog that the best way we can, so we can get on the agenda with the people in the most. So I suppose the short answer to your question is, it's all on the table. Presumably the commercial side is a way to raise the capital that allows you to actually create the technologies that can do that. That's right. And then how you license that, you could do that in a non-profit, presumably after that. Correct. Lots of flexibility. All right, question up here? Oh, sorry. Yes? Interestingly, you mentioned that you'd like to have a cross-disciplinary team that brings in expertise from all around the university, and I gather your devices over time will produce a lot of medical information in real time. Governments have gone, spent billions of dollars on producing things like the summary care record in the UK and my health record in Australia. Does your technology plan to integrate with those type of efforts, or will it supersede those big spending plans? And therefore, do you need a political scientist? That's part of your interdisciplinary team. Well, yes, please. Oh, that question is so many layers to it. Our starting point is to generate the data. It's to get in place, to the wide bother. If we don't produce attributes with these particular devices and technologies that make a difference in health care, then we don't even need to consider the kind of things that you've just talked about because we know that it won't be on the table. We certainly need to work closely with people that have a lighter sight on that. We want to make sure that we... Bad analogy, but I'll do it anyway. We want to make sure that we don't end up with a format. So I'm probably showing my age, but I remember Betamax and VHS, right? So we want to make sure that we are plugging in the format that actually will work in that world. And it's an interesting space. Who owns the data? How that works? We're fascinated in that. But our first job is to generate the data that matters in health care. OK, good. Yeah, so the last time I took my kids to get a vaccination which isn't as long ago as you might think, they didn't have a nanopatch. So I'm just wondering two things. First of all, where is the nanopatch at the moment? Like, what's its status in the world of vaccinations? And second of all, I have no idea. It's a tiny little thing. How does it work? Where's the vaccine in that little thing that you passed around? Where is it? Oh, there it is. So that's just my sense of here. So there's one nanopatch used for clinical work. Well, that one's not. But it's a bizarre. So let's see. So this work has been published. I can talk about it. So the nanopatch has been proven now clinically using CSL's vaccine. Well, it's a subsidiary of CSL called Securus. And I think I've got that correct. I'll just check. Yep, OK, good. And it's going forward in the company called Vaxus. And so there's further clinical work taking place. So it's not on the market. Yeah, I understand that. It comes back to... Let's talk about the 15-year thing. When I first came up with the core nanopatch idea, it was in 2003. So here we are. It's 15 years later. It's not on the market yet. But it's got legs and it's going forward. But it's not an easy ride. Where is the vaccine? Yeah. So what we do is we dry coat the vaccine. So it's in solid format on the micro projections. It's typically about one micron thick. It's a very, very thin film. And you manage to get, because of the way we concentrate the vaccine, you manage to get, if you want it, a full human dose of the vaccine. And Brian touched on this briefly. But one of the attributes of the patch is it offers the possibility if the immunology allows us to do it for lower doses than what you have a standard needle based vaccine. One of our entrepreneurs here on staff, I see. Thank you, Vice Chancellor. You have a company, I believe, and I'll be interested to see how you see this company interacting with people developing intellectual property at the ANU, which may be in competition. How do you foresee this proceeding within the university structure? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, intellectual property is always one of those interfaces. How do you manage that? So we've got a framework of a bunch of agreements between ANU and Amor Oxnato that we've worked up really carefully, trying to capture the spirit of collaboration, trying to cut down... We want to try and avoid situations of people being partitioned too much. So we're kind of leaning towards a high cost model, because if we're... If I say it another way, I didn't really describe what a Scunk Works was, by the way, but the thesis of that is it's a tight team where there's strong communication and the working world together. So that's the spirit of what we're looking to do and recognize that, yeah... I mean, it's a fine line between a competitor and a collaborator anyway. And there's so many different fields. There's so many different ways where people can still do their thing, yet different commercial interests can be looked after. So that's the spirit we're hanging in with. I think it's fair enough to say that it's a bit of an experiment and we're going to learn some lessons along the way. And I promise you that where Optimal takes off and is part of a mega-company, the conversations will become more complicated. But it's a complication I look forward to. All right, so we're about... I'll take one last question if there is one, and then it's time over here if that's okay. Yeah. Mark, you talked about problems with the variability in health care of individuals. If you collect enough data, will you get to the point where you can get an average profile that's significant, for example, so you can predict at the moment the population might get glucose or diabetes? And what would happen in 50 years if the CO2 concentration increased by X, which you can sort of predict? Can you tie a much better statistical argument if you collect enough data, or is the variability so great for individuals that still doesn't happen? So, to develop a healthy respect for biological variability, what we're looking to do with our devices is to measure it. So, in the absence of individual data points tracking one person, what's the option? Well, the option is to do population-based approaches. We have to have many, many patients get one data point and aggregate and do the kind of statistics that you've referred to, and that's how traditional clinical trials work. And, you know, that still will happen in many different formats, but what if you look at the asymptote at the other end where you've got a profile just for you, so you have a mountain of data generated just for you, so you will have your own biological variability, your own data, and then you've got it with many different sources that get aggregated, then a particular intervention can be tailored for you as opposed to just working off the average, because there's always outlives. Certainly data in this field is always a good thing rather than a bad thing. There's going to be lots of complications of how we do it, but, again, that will be fun. Next, it's time to wrap up, but I'm going to have Nick Cardew-Hall, our Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research and Innovation, finish proceedings off. So it's down to me to do a vote of thanks. I first met Mark probably about two years ago when he first came to campus on Brian's invitation, and he took me through the concepts that you've heard today, and I sat there and I felt not sure about this, a bit skeptical about this one, and it wasn't that I don't think we could do it. I don't think it wasn't possible, but to do it, you have to have the appropriate leader, and I'm always needing to test out the academic. Over that two-year period, what I've observed with Mark is an outstanding academic in the traditional sense. What I've been more impressed over that time is that he is an inventor. He's an inventor in the spirit of Edison and Marconi, and I think that was a major thing that set him apart from his other academic colleagues. But over and above that, I've now observed him interface with politicians, senior bureaucrats, major investors in London and California, and a whole range of other stakeholders in a way that you can see that this is somebody that can really pull this together, and he was really deserving of being an A&U entrepreneurial professor. What we've seen today is a glimpse, I think, of what is something that's very exciting for us, and I think Mark has got the capability to lead us there, and I think we're very fortunate to have him here at the A&U. I think he's given us a glimpse in this lecture, and I would just like us to give him a vote of thanks for giving us a view of what the future might be. Mark, thank you.