Sparks fly in Sydney on healthcare

Healthcare commercialisation is due to receive a boost at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) following the opening of Spark Sydney.

Launched in conjunction with the Kolling Institute of Medical Research at Royal North Shore Hospital, Spark’s focus on healthcare tech transfer makes it the first initiative of its kind in Australia to maintain emphasis on the sector.

Spark plans to collaborate with UTS and Kolling on translating intellectual property stemming from research which may not yet have seen the light of day due to a lack of resources or capacity from traditional tech transfer offices.

Michael Wallach, director at Spark Sydney, said: “Traditional research funding models are highly bureaucratic, lengthy and competitive processes. The difficulty of securing funding for some truly creative ideas and the lack of fundamental understanding of collaboration between academia and industry has led us to try something different. We need new paradigms for how we structure our discovery science so that it results in more research outcomes making it to market,”