Australian startups receive $18.5 M to commercialise research to cure blindness, find cancer, and make childbirth safer

Eight startups make up the first group to receive funding through the CUREator+ programme

The Australian government is investing $18.5 million to help eight Australian startup companies to commercialise their research and help turn their discoveries into new medicines and treatment tools for cancer, pregnancy complications, eye damage, and other conditions.

Mirugen has received almost $2 million to develop a gene therapy which could potentially cure some types of blindness by regenerating cells in the eye to help restore vision. 

OncoRes Medical will receive $2.5 million to create a device to help surgeons to better identify cancer cells during surgery. By ensuring all cancerous cells are removed, the device could improve the success rate for initial surgery and reduce the need for follow-up surgery.

Baymatob Operations has been awarded almost $2.5 million to finalise software that can identify pregnant women likely to experience severe bleeding during childbirth. The software has the potential to save the lives of both mothers and babies and help women avoid other emergencies during labour.

This funding will also support:

• Amplificare to develop a drug that will help doctors find out earlier if cancer treatment has been successful
• Currus Biologics to improve the success of CAR T-cell therapy for treatment of solid tumour cancers like cancers of the breast, colon, pancreas and prostate
• Kinoxis Therapeutics to test a new drug to reduce agitation and aggression in people with dementia
• Micromune Therapeutics to develop a safer and more effective drug to treat inflammatory bowel disease, and
• SeeTreat to create software to reduce the side effects of breast cancer treatment by making radiation therapy more accurate so it only targets cancerous cells.  

The eight Australian startups were identified through the CUREator+ programme, which aims to accelerate the process of turning health and medical research discoveries into clinical tools and treatments.

It is funded by a $50 million BioMedTech Incubator Grant from the Medical Research Future Fund’s (MRFF) Medical Research Commercialisation initiative to identify and select Australian small and medium enterprises working on early-stage health and medical research. 

Published on : 23rd December, 2024