National Survey of Research Commercialisation - Australian ...

The development, by St Pierre and his team at the University of Western Australia’s
Faculty of Life and Physical Sciences, allows a doctor to more accurately measure
iron concentrations in human tissue. Its main application is the management of iron
metabolism disorders such as hereditary haemochromatosis and thalassaemia which can
cause increased iron levels leading to tissue damage. Over time fibrosis and cirrhosis can
set in, which can be fatal.
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Until now the only way a doctor has been able to measure the iron build up in the liver is
by taking a core sample with a large millimetre-wide needle in a procedure considered so
unpleasant that some patients refuse it.
This sample is also often unreliable because the iron build-up is not uniform throughout
the liver.
However, the technology developed by the UWA team creates a liver map, showing
accurately how much iron is in the liver and how it is distributed through the organ.
There’s no patient discomfort, and the quality of information on which a doctor has to
base his or her management of the disease is vastly improved.
The development arose after St Pierre and his team realised the magnetic properties of
particles in tissue could produce information on their size and structure. He immediately
started looking for practical ways to apply this discovery, especially for iron-overload
diseases.
An inter-disciplinary collaboration was formed — St Pierre, a medical chemist Dr Wanida
Chua-Anusorn, and mature-age PhD student, Paul Clark, a specialist in electronics and
electrical engineering who had previously been with the CSIRO Division of Radiophysics.
The physicist, the chemist and the electronics engineer brought together just the right
set of skills, with Clark able to write the sophisticated software required to measure and
interpret the iron concentrations.
‘To make the measurements we had to understand the relationship between the physics
of water molecules diffusing through iron-loaded tissue, and the general magnetic
properties so we could work out how to drive a magnetic resonance imager to gather the
data from which iron concentrations could be calculated,’ St Pierre explained.
Once the team had the basic set-up it was tested on rats, then ‘phantoms’ (magnetic
particles in a gel to simulate an iron-loaded liver) and finally in clinical trials with
patients.
A provisional patent was issued in 2000 and with a $400,000 equity investment by a Perth
radiology provider, SKG Radiology, a spin-off company, Inner Vision Biometrics was
formed.
Word-of-mouth saw the technology quickly picked up in New Zealand, Thailand (where
there is a high incidence of thalassaemia), Indonesia, Portugal, Italy, Greece and the
United States. However, in 2002, the NHMRC provided a grant to put the final touches on
the research, and help the company to begin promoting the technology.
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