Christchurch medical device company Mars Bioimaging has sold one of its portable CT scanners into a working clinic for the first time, nearly two decades after a father and son team began building the technology in a University of Canterbury laboratory.
The buyer is Reform Radiology, an imaging provider also based in Christchurch. In a statement released on 4 August, Mars said the installation is the first clinical deployment anywhere in the world of its MARS Extremity Imaging System, and that Reform will act as the company’s global reference site while it pushes into overseas markets.
For a medical device company, the stretch between a working prototype and a paying clinical customer is where most of the money and most of the years go. Mars Bioimaging was founded in 2007. It has spent the time since raising capital, refining the hardware, running trials and grinding through regulatory approval, all before a single machine could be billed to a clinic that intends to scan patients with it every week.
Group chief executive Dr Ojas Mahapatra said in the statement that “after significant efforts to develop, validate and secure regulatory approval for this technology, seeing it move into routine clinical practice is the milestone every medical device company strives to achieve”.
The machine images the hand, wrist and forearm. It is a photon counting scanner, which means the detector records the energy of each individual X-ray photon rather than simply measuring how much radiation gets through. Because different materials absorb different energies, the software can separate bone, cartilage, soft tissue, blood vessels and metal implants and render them as distinct colours instead of shades of grey. Mars puts the resolution at better than a tenth of a millimetre.
The commercial pitch is size as much as picture quality. A conventional CT suite needs a hospital or a large radiology practice to house it and pay for it. The Mars unit is built to sit in a community clinic, a sports medicine practice or a day surgery, which widens the pool of possible buyers well beyond the handful of large imaging centres in any given country.
Reform Radiology was set up in 2023 by a clinician led group and runs MRI, CT, PET and CT, ultrasound, X-ray and nuclear medicine services. General manager Paul Mouthaan said the practice “has always sought to bring new leading edge imaging capabilities and services to patients across the South Island”.
Radiologist Thomas Moritz, also of Reform Radiology, said “the spatial resolution this system provides is excellent for imaging the intricate bony and soft tissue anatomy of the hand and wrist”. Orthopaedic hand and wrist surgeon Dr Fiona Timms, of The Hand and Wrist Centre, said the scanner “provides excellent imaging, particularly of boney anatomy and allows for 3D imaging reconstruction”.
The detectors at the heart of the machine did not start life in medicine. Mars holds an exclusive licence to commercialise CERN’s Medipix3 chip for point of care medical imaging. Medipix was designed to track particles inside the detectors at the Large Hadron Collider, the same laboratory complex where the Higgs boson was found. Physicist Phil Butler, then head of the New Zealand CERN research group, and his son Anthony Butler, a radiologist, spent years working out how to point that technology at a human arm rather than a particle beam. In 2018 the pair produced what CERN described as the first 3D colour X-ray of a human, an image of a wrist and watch that travelled around the world.
Getting from that photograph to a sale took another eight years. The decisive step came in March, when the United States Food and Drug Administration granted the extremity scanner 510(k) clearance for upper extremity imaging. That clearance is the door into the largest CT market on earth, and it is the reason the company can now talk credibly about scaling rather than piloting.
The money to make that push was raised earlier this year. Mars closed an oversubscribed $15 million Series A round led by Auckland deep technology investor Pacific Channel, taken in two tranches of $7.6 million and $7.4 million. New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has backed the company’s offshore market entry work. The stated plan is to concentrate on the United States while continuing to sell at home and into selected emerging markets.
It is worth keeping the scale of this in proportion. One scanner in one Christchurch clinic is a modest commercial event on its own. What it buys the company is a reference site, a clinic that other buyers can visit and radiologists who can be quoted about how the machine performs on real patients rather than on test phantoms. In medical imaging, that kind of proof tends to matter more to a purchasing committee than any brochure.
The harder test is what comes next. Selling medical devices in the United States means building distribution, standing up a service network so a broken machine does not sit idle for a fortnight, and persuading insurers to pay for the scans. Plenty of technically excellent devices have stalled at exactly that point. New Zealand has produced very few medical device exporters that have made it through to real scale, and the ones that have took a long time doing it.
For Christchurch, though, this is a rare thing. A piece of particle physics hardware licensed out of Europe has been turned into a product designed, built and now sold from a city better known in business pages for rebuilds and insurance disputes. Whether it becomes an export business or stays a clever local machine will be decided in American clinics over the next couple of years, not in Canterbury.
What do you think? Should New Zealand be doing more to help home grown medical technology get from the laboratory to the market, or is the long grind part of the job? Leave a comment below and tell us what you make of it.
Original source: nz