This week in our Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers series, we hear from Professor Mark Kendall, CEO and founder of WearOptimo. Brent Balinski spoke to Kendall, whose patents have generated an estimated $2 billion in economic activity.
With a novel way to monitor biosignals using electrodes sitting just under a wearer’s skin, WearOptimo hopes to one day revolutionise healthcare. But right now its focus is on sports.
The company was founded in 2018 by Professor Mark Kendall, who studied rocketry before becoming “an accidental biomedical engineer” at Oxford University and proceeding along a 27-year-path of highly-awarded invention.
Potential uses for the company’s sticker-like sensors could one day include warnings for heart attacks or other problems for wearers based on their health data. But to begin with, WearOptimo is focussed on hydration among sectors including aged care, resources and defence, with the very first users to be elite athletes.
It’s a “high-impact, low-volume” application of its tech, as the company ramps up production for goals including an anticipated market launch for hydration “Microwearables” in 2026, explains Kendall.
The inventor turned his focus to wearables in 2015, following the release of the first Apple Watch. At the time, he had just left needle-free vaccine delivery company Vaxxas – which he founded in 2011 based on a program of research he led at University of Queensland – and was on sabbatical at Harvard.
Kendall saw that surface-based wearables “are entirely limited by that barrier function with what they’re achieving by using light,” he tells @AuManufacturing.
“We identified this and created microelectrodes that just reach into this outer layer of the skin, as one example, the viable epidermis. And that then opens up this rich array of biosignals you can otherwise not reach.”
WearOptimo is a third distinct career chapter, following development of “gene gun” biolistics technology at Oxford, then the Vaxxas era.
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Kendall says that healthtech moves at a much faster pace than his previous industry, bringing up the signature achievement of his “colleague, friend and mentor” Professor Ian Frazer. Frazer’s cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil took 17 years from idea to product.
“That’s biotech,” adds Kendall.
The pace did not slacken at WearOptimo in December, with the announcement of another $8 million in funding – backers included former Formula 1 champion Mark Webber and ex-rugby league international Adam MacDougall – and the launch of the $7 million first phase of its Brisbane factory.
The facility makes use of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) for sensor production, and Kendall says this is a world-first use of the technique for healthtech. Uses elsewhere include for OLED displays.
As for his personal view on what makes a company innovative, Kendall offers that it’s less about incremental improvements and more about something that’s never been done before and which has significant impact.
Operating right at “the edge of the fusion of tech and science” isn’t for the squeamish, either.
“…People ask what’s it like doing this, you could be in academia, having a – from the outside looking in – a simpler life. Dare I say almost a cruiser life, if you like,” says Kendall.
“And the answer is ‘well, for me it’s an extreme sport’ is the best analogy I can give. And it chooses you as much as you choose it. It’s a bit of a calling. But if you want to do it, then you need to be an extreme athlete as well. You need to be able to handle it.”
In this episode of the podcast, available to stream below and download elsewhere, Kendall tells us more about his company, which aims to reshape the healthcare industry by interpreting biosignals via the skin.
Australia’s 50 Most Innovative Manufacturers is an annual campaign by @AuManufacturing. The current version has been made possible through the generous support of Australia Wide Engineering Recruitment, TXM Lean Solutions, the Industry Capability Network, Bonfiglioli Australia, the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre and the SmartCrete CRC. You can nominate here (there is no administration fee) until March 15.
Episode guide
1:13 – A 27-year career, from rockets to vaccine delivery to micro-wearables for personalised medicine. “My guiding purpose in all of this is using my skillsets… for making a difference in global healthcare.”
2:33 – Introducing WearOptimo and what it does.
3:40 – Leaving needle-free vaccine delivery company Vaxxas and heading to Harvard for a sabbatical, working alongside Moderna co-founder Bob Langer and others. Saw the opportunities in wearables “gaining access to signals” at the “viable epidermis” skin layer and providing better info than light-based approaches in smartwatches.
4:50 – A few differences between founding Vaxxas versus founding WearOptimo.
6:30 – “Instead of thousands of projections coated in vaccines it’s just a handful of much smaller micro-electrodes going even shallower into the skin that are just gently applied to the skin instead of at high speed.”
7:03 – Not being “a one-trick pony” as an inventor.
8:13 – Healthtech is “a much higher-tempo game” than biotech. Why starting WearOptimo as a university spinout would be too slow.
10:10 – How skin works, how the micro-wearables work, and why hydration monitoring was the right first application.
11:55 “The only wearable on the planet that genuinely monitors hydration… The unmet need is massive.” Plus some examples of where this is expected to come from.
13:49 – Nano-imprint lithography is the centrepiece production technology – a technique used in TV screens and optics at the company – as well as an example of the company’s “field-hopping”. Kendall considers this a leap forward in the field of microneedles.
16:50 – Why Brisbane is the right place to produce micro-wearables, and why the company changed their mind about offshore contractors.
19:30 – How they selected their first market – “we need to walk before we can run” – and why it’s elite sport.
21:45 – No need for regulatory approval for initial markets. Regulated markets will follow later.
23:30 – Some characteristics that define a truly innovative company, according to Kendall. These include novelty and non-incremental impact.
24:45 – Developing high-tech businesses: “It’s not a game for the faint-hearted.”
26:08 – An issue that isn’t getting enough attention: genuine advanced manufacturing positioned on the world stage. Plus why “me-too” manufacturing is to be avoided.
28:38 – WearOptimo’s approach to finding talent.