- Several ASX healthcare companies are proudly manufacturing products in Australia
- Polynovo, Optiscan and Trajan Group all have manufacturing facilities in Melbourne
Optiscan (ASX:OIL)
OIL, is a global leader in developing, manufacturing, and commercialising confocal endomicroscopy imaging technologies for medical, translational, and pre-clinical applications.
The company’s technology, known as optical biopsy, generates real-time microscopic images, potentially eliminating the need for physical biopsies.
CEO and managing director Dr Camile Farah told
* all OIL’s R&D and its products manufacturing is conducted at its headquarters in Mulgrave, Melbourne.
“We build all our devices on site at our Melbourne facility,” he said.
“This includes everything from the optical sub-assemblies that form the major component of our imaging probes, to the imaging towers themselves.
“We have many suppliers for the various parts that go into our devices – all being said that’s about 150 individual pieces required for the multi-stage build.”
OIL has three products currently on the market including ViewnVivo, which it sells to research institutions, universities and big pharma.
“It’s for anyone using living imaging for animal research or live imaging for cell culture research where they need a very small miniaturised microscope to enter the animal,” Farah says.
“Drug companies use our technology to monitor progress of their drugs when injected into animal models of cancer for example.”
The company’s second device is its intra-oral digital microscope InVivage, designed for oral cancer and pathology imaging in a dental surgery or hospital.
In June OIL unveiled its third microscopic medical imaging device InVue, which is designed to enable precision surgery by putting real-time digital pathology access directly into the hands of surgeons.
The company also has several other imaging devices and platforms under development. In May, OIL announced it had inked a
know-how agreement with the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in the US to develop a digital confocal laser endomicroscopic imaging system for use in robotic surgery.
“All of that manufacturing and R&D will be done in Melbourne,” Farah says.
Farah says OIL has several reasons for maintaining manufacturing in Australia.
“We’re a spinout from Monash University so our R&D focus has been very strong and all of the know how is within our company,” he says.
“We’ve tried to outsource some things along the way but its very technically challenging to do and you need a lot of the insights and skills to manufacture and assemble our products.
“We have plans to expand our manufacturing and have taken up more space on premises so we can grow and are going to take on more staff as we scale up. We want to control the quality of what is high-precision technology.”
Furthermore, Farah says the Victorian and Australian Governments have been very supportive of manufacturing in the medical technology space.
In February, OIL announced it had received a $3m Cooperative Research Centres Projects (CRC-P) grant to work on its Edge-AI-enabled gastrointestinal endomicroscope from the Federal government.
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