Dr Alison Todd believes that, without mentoring, SpeeDx, the global diagnostics company she co-founded, would not exist. “I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m a lucky person, that in the end had the right mentor at the right time,” says Todd.
When Australia was in the grip of the 2008 global financial crisis, pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson downsized, and shut down the department where Dr Alison Todd and Dr Elisa Mokany worked. Susan Pond, the then Managing Director of Johnson & Johnson Australia, counselled them to start their own company, and introduced them to venture capitalists. “It was a definite push, not a pull,” Todd tells the Brilliant. But the result was that the pair became “accidental entrepreneurs”.
In a critical first step, Todd and Mokany negotiated the assignment of the technology they developed at Johnson and Johnson and founded SpeeDx — a company that develops diagnostic tools that lets laboratories identify many different bacteria and antibiotic resistance targets all at once. This means that not only can doctors test a patient for disease, they can also work out which antibiotics that patient is resistant to, and which ones they will respond to best – all at the same time.
SpeeDx now has a staff of 100 and offices in Australia, the UK and US. Its technology is used to fight rapidly evolving superbugs, to identify respiratory viruses, and to detect genetic mutations in cancer cells — deep tech developments that will have a significant impact on human health and wellbeing.
Todd’s love of inventing is infectious. With 85 patents and another 57 pending, her work is prolific. “I’m a very good inventor. I don’t want to do anything else,” she said.
In the early days, Todd was the General Manager. “But when we were big enough, I said, ‘Okay, I want to get back to what I am good at’.” Todd is now Chief Scientific Officer.
Success is a village
While invention is at the heart of the business, Todd credits SpeeDx’s success to a number of external factors. “We wouldn’t be here without Susan Pond. She gave us the initial push, but she also introduced Elisa and I to venture capitalists Andrew Denver and Andrew Jane. They have been very patient.” She added: “The trouble with SpeeDx is we have just continued to grow at such at rate, that it has never been the right time for their exit. They recognise that there is a large amount of uncaptured potential there.”.
Big tech incubator Cicada Innovations, owned by several Australian universities, has also been integral to their growth. “Cicada helped us grow. They gave us affordable space and allowed us to grow substantially within their premises,” she says; the SpeeDx team have built laboratories and manufacturing space at Cicada headquarters at South Eveleigh in New South Wales. “They are also very connected and provide introductions – someone to just go and talk to, advice about grants and training for our team. It’s helped us manage our growth,” she says. Todd believes that things could have gone quite differently if they had just rented office space outside the incubator.
Funding from the NSW Medical Devices Fund also kept SpeeDx viable; their commercialisation training program was also essential to Mokany and Todd in the early days.
Todd recommends that researchers who want to launch companies should focus on building relationships with government, industry, hospitals, universities and other people in the health eco-system.
If you lack support in any sector, you may be disadvantaged because you need friends at all levels. You never know when and where they’re putting in a good word for you, whispering in the right person’s ear,” she says.
She also disputes the idea that universities aren’t pulling their weight in research commercialisation. “They’re doing fabulous translational research, but they still need somebody to be able to put it in a box and sell it. The process requires everybody from academics to manufacturers.”
Yet she says there are several structural weaknesses that hold back Australian entrepreneurialism, particularly strategic planning around grants and the availability of local VC funding. “I would love to see even more government funding directed to accelerating deep tech manufacturers such as SpeeDx, which are focused on health and personalised medicine.”
Todd also laments that some local investors have passed up the chance to invest their capital. “I’m extremely grateful for our funding, wherever it comes from, but I would have loved a bigger percentage of SpeeDx to remain Australian owned. We are an Australian success story after all.”
Giving something back
Todd has come a long way from the days she was asked to leave her high school for being difficult, and later dropping out of veterinary science. Finally, she found her métier in inventing.
Her other great passion is mentoring. “I have two talents: Invention, and spotting talent,” she says. Mokany, the co-founder of SpeeDx, was originally her research assistant and then her PhD student. “Then we set up the company together. Nowadays I am eating her dust,” says Todd. Todd also is an Adjunct Professor at the University of NSW, where she trains the next generation of medical researchers and entrepreneurs. “We’ve also had 20 interns from Sydney University and we have put four people through PhDs, through UNSW” she says, adding that she’s had PhD students for more than 20 years. “Two former students, one still at SpeeDx and the other now at the Kirby Institute, are collaboratively managing SpeeDx projects as part of a large new Australian Research Council (ARC) Hub set up to Combat Antimicrobial Resistance. I’m very proud of them both; it gives me great pleasure to watch their continuing development.” Todd may be an accidental entrepreneur, but her work is changing lives every day. “What I am most proud of is that millions of people have had one of our tests and it has resulted in them getting the right treatment.”
It’s not just individual patients who are benefiting from the technology – the whole of society is. Antibiotic resistance is acknowledged to be one of the biggest medical challenges of our time. “We will have an untreatable superbug in the future, says Todd. “Every time someone is treated with the wrong thing,” it’s driving resistance.
But SpeeDx is “helping turn the tide on diseases where there has been antibiotic resistance, by steering towards the right drugs,” she says. For example, she says, a SpeeDx test can tell if a patient infected with Mycoplasma genitalium has one of the mutations that’s resistant to the usual treatment. By changing the treatment, “the cure rate goes up to 93%”.
As Todd says, “We are helping clinicians make informed decisions that improve patient outcomes.”
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Article by Kylie Ahern
Photo Credit: Michael Amendolia