Add Category
When the chief scientist at biotech company SpeeDx, Alison Todd, isn't spending her time fighting superbugs, she's worrying about another battle: The lack of women in senior positions in STEM.
SpeeDx employs about 70 per cent women, across its organisation, but Dr Todd says "this is not a result of a pro-active policy".
"It merely reflects the facts that nearly 60 per cent of medical science and health graduates are women and many high-calibre women have applied to work at SpeeDx," she tells Fairfax Media.
The trouble is keeping them. Within STEM generally, only about 20 per cent of senior positions are held by women.
"At SpeeDx we have reversed this with three of the four C-level positions held by women; however since two of these women are the founders, this is not surprising," she says.
Women in industry need to "step up and mentor other women" to move up the ranks, she says.
Dr Todd spent her career working as a senior research director at Johnson & Johnson, which had downsized after the global financial crisis of 2008.
Taking the technology from a discarded research program, she co-founded SpeeDx with Elisa Mokany.
"Elisa and I started our working relationship as a PhD student and a supervisor, but 17 years later, we have a true partnership," she says.
Two years ago, SpeeDx appointed Colin Denver as its chief executive.
"Together, we endeavour to mentor both the women and the men within our organisation," Dr Todd says, adding that flexible work is key to helping women stay in the industry.
"We employed a woman when she was seven months pregnant in a marketing role," she says.
Based at Cicada Innovations in Sydney's Eveleigh, SpeeDx has grown from a small team of four to more than 40, who work to develop, manufacture and sell medical tests throughout the world that are used to stop superbugs.
SpeeDx recently closed off Series A capital-raising, getting $5 million via Australian investors to help with FDA clearances for new tests.
Its main game is dealing with a drug-resistant sexually transmitted infection that is common but little known to most people.
It is called Mycoplasma genitalium (MG) and it is behaving like a superbug.
Researchers estimate as many as 400,000 Australians may be carrying the STI which has many of the same health risks as chlamydia.
The reported incidence of MG is 2.5 times greater than the better-known STI: Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
"It [MG] is strongly associated with non-gonococcal urethritis in both men and women and with cervicitis and pelvic inflammatory disease in women," says Dr Todd.
MG was discovered in the early 1980s but is still listed as "recently identified" in the Australian STI management guidelines for use in primary care, and is considered an "emerging issue" by the US Centres for Disease Control.
"It is also under investigation for a possible role in pre-term births and infertility," Dr Todd says.
Australia's one of the first countries to approve commercial tests. SpeeDx got approval from the Therapeutic Goods Administration in January.
Dr Todd hopes it will be included in routine sexual health screening in the future.
"It has been recognised worldwide as a serious global public health threat requiring aggressive action to identify infections and limit both the spread of transmission and the emergence of resistance," she says.
The incidence of STIs is growing steadily. "Within the last 10 years in Australia the number of cases reported has more than doubled for Neisseria gonorrhoeae and tripled for syphilis," she says.
"Increasing resistance to antibiotics used to treat STIs ... has the potential to result in these becoming incurable superbugs."
Early results are proving positive: "One study by an early adopter, which used SpeeDx's ResistancePlus MG test to guide the implementation of a new treatment regime, saw increased cure rates of more than 30 per cent," she says.
In response to growing rates of syphilis infection seen across the globe, SpeeDx has just launched a new test which combines detection for syphilis with other common causes of lesions – herpes and chicken pox (shingles).
"SDx-branded tests [are] throughout Australia, NZ and Europe," Dr Todd says. "Next year we aim to enter the US market.
"Our pipeline of tests soon to be released include a large-scale multiplex for respiratory viruses, as well as detection."
SpeeDx also has a Belgian licensee, Biocartis, which now sells a menu of seven "companion diagnostics" using SpeeDx technology.
The technology allows clinicians to tailor therapy for which drugs are most appropriate for individual patients with melanoma, lung and colorectal cancer.
Last year the company opened a second office in London, and now also has a US representative looking for opportunities there and in Canada.
The company also wants to expand into Asia, starting with Singapore and Hong Kong.
Aside from capital raising, the company gets millions of dollars of federal and state funding support to carry out its research.