May 22, 2021

Advertisement An Australian government fund meant to support local biomedical development invested millions in a struggling New Zealand-founded exoskeleton company that has almost no staff in Australia. Rex Bionics, which manufactures $150,000-plus exoskeletons for wheelchair users, employs only one person in Australia , and is running no local clinical trials. Research, development and manufacturing all remain based in New Zealand. Minister for Health Greg Hunt with Australian Institute of Neuro-rehabilitation director and spinal injury victim Louis Rowe demonstrating the Rex Bionics Exoskeleton. Credit:Twitter The roughly $6 million taxpayer investment was guided by an international investment firm, BioScience Managers. BioScience Managers was appointed in 2016 as a manager of the Turnbull government’s flagship Biomedical Translation Fund, which had $250 million in taxpayer and $250 million in private funding to invest. The idea was to have BioScience Managers make “commercially defensible” investment decisions with taxpayer money, a government spokeswoman said. In 2017, Health Minister Greg Hunt stood with a patient wearing Rex’s exoskeleton at a news conference in Canberra. He lauded Australia’s investment in Rex and and two other companies as supporting “high potential Australian innovations” and “homegrown inventions could transform the lives of not only Australian patients, but people right across the world”. Dr Jodie Marquez, one of the only Australian scientists to have studied the legs, was in attendance. “At that presentation Greg Hunt was saying ‘this is great Australian-owned technology’. But it never was,” she said. “This was always New Zealand’s. But now we’re claiming it as Australian, we’ve invested in it.” A spokesman for Mr Hunt said “neither the minister nor the government are the decision maker in relation to BTF program investments and their commercial terms”. He said the government had received advice from BioScience Managers the investment met the Biomedical Translation Fund’s guidelines. “A mechanism for dealing with conflicts of interest is included in the governing documents of each fund and is overseen by an advisory board,” a government spokeswoman said. “The department cannot provide specific details of individual conflicts of interest.” Rex Bionics was founded by a pair of engineers in an Auckland garage in 2007, before listing on a lower-tier British-based stock exchange in 2014. It has received millions of dollars from the New Zealand government in research and development grants. Rex Bionics chief technology officer Richard Little puts New Zealand Prime Minister John Key through his paces during a 2016 visit Credit:Rex Bionics / Supplied But Rex struggled to sell its exoskeletons, and in 2017 came close to insolvency. When Rex listed on the British stockmarket in 2014, listing documents noted its “success depends to a significant degree” on the technical skills of co-inventor Richard Little. He left the company in 2017, and told The Sunday Age he had really left much earlier than that. “They had their plans in place. They weren’t really my plans,” he said. “I really did step back from that sort of side of things. I was such a minority shareholder – it wasn’t really my company at that stage. I felt close to the product, but not the company.” Rex now says it is working with Melbourne-based engineering company Hydrix on redesigning and upgrading the exoskeleton. Asked how much of Rex’s operations were in Australia, Rex’s CEO Charles Carignan said the company was now based in Melbourne. However, it employed only a single person in Australia - although there were plans to increase that to three or four. “Unfortunately, the last 15 months of no travel, has been a challenge for the company. We actually had some people who left because of that, that now we’re fortunately bringing back.” In 2016, a charity part-funded a clinical trial of Rex’s exoskeleton in the Hunter Valley. That trial revealed a number of key flaws with the expensive exoskeleton, said lead investigator Dr Jodie Marquez from the University of Newcastle. For example, the exoskeleton only comes in right-handed models. “If you have a stroke that effects your right-hand side, you are instantly ineligible. That’s 50 per cent of the stroke population,” she said. The device also has height and weight requirements for users – further limiting who can use it. “It is only so adjustable. People were either to tall, too short, or too fat to fit into the device,” she said. “Because of those restrictions regarding eligibility, clinical application of it is going to be very limited, to a restricted few.” Rex says the exoskeleton can be piloted by a physiotherapist, rather than the user, meaning the right-handed controls are not always an issue. The exoskeleton can hold people up to 193cm, but is limited to 100 kilograms - in line with other competing exoskeletons. However, the company said that all Rex’s exoskeleton suits in Australia are now past their maintenance schedule. The company’s British-based technician has been unable to visit and service them. Because of that, they cannot be safely used. Science and health explained and analysed with a rigorous focus on the evidence. Examine is a free weekly newsletter by science reporter Liam Mannix. Sign up to The Age’s here and the Sydney Morning Herald’s here . 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