Innovations for the space and medical industries

[Music plays and the Earth can be seen spinning in Space, and inset images appear of a female operating a computer, a satellite dish, and a female smiling at the camera, and then text appears: Space Careers Wayfinder]

[Image changes to show Ilana Feain walking towards the camera in front of the Australia Telescope National Facility, Marsfield NSW, and text appears: Australia Telescope National Facility Marsfield, NSW]

Ilana Feain: My name is Ilana Feain

[Image changes to show a close view of Ilana talking to the camera, and text appears: Ilana Feain, Director, Astronomy Australia]

and I currently work for myself doing consulting to mainly astronomy and other big science groups and organizations around commercialisation and strategy.

[Image changes to show Ilana and a colleague looking at a piece of equipment, and then the image changes to show a CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory sign next to a fence]

And I sit on the board of Quasar Satellite Technologies which is a spinout, out of CSIRO.

[Images move through to show Ilana talking to the camera, a view of Ilana walking past a radio telescope, and Ilana talking to the camera]

The quote ‘Don’t find customers for your products but products for your customers’ is another way of I guess thinking about this whole idea around you build it and they will come. So, if you’ve got a great idea as a scientist, all you have to do is build it and sell it and you make millions of dollars and it’s a big success. It never works like that.

[Image changes to show a close view of Ilana talking to the camera]

We scientists have a really tough time appreciating that. So, you know, really to be a success in entrepreneurship and commercialisation, you really do have to start with what your customer wants.

[Images move through to show a car parked in front of a workshop, and then Ilana in conversation with a customer inside the workshop]

And that means getting out of your office, talking to your customers about what is so painful for them that they will actually pay to have that pain removed.

[Image changes to show a close view of Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show Ilana in conversation with a customer inside the workshop]

Once you know where that pain point is for your customer, then you can start to look at well then what products can I potentially create, or sell to them, to address that pain point.

[Image changes to show a view looking up at a night sky, and then the image changes to show a radio telescope, and then the image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

After I left astronomy, I went to Sydney University to do some research in cancer radiotherapy.

[Image changes to show a close view of spike proteins under a microscope]

There are three main ways you treat cancer.

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The first way is that you cut it out, which is surgery.

[Image changes to show a close view of a chemotherapy drip, and then the camera zooms out to show patients receiving chemotherapy treatment]

The second way is you poison the whole body and hopefully poison the tumour at the same time, and that’s chemotherapy.

[Image changes to show a patient undergoing radiotherapy treatment]

And the third way is you try and basically kill the tumour by shooting high energy x-rays at it, and that’s radiotherapy.

[Image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show a side view of a patient undergoing radiotherapy]

And so the group at Sydney University I was working for, was trying to work out how to make radiotherapy much more affordable and equitable, because at the moment it’s very, very centred on high income, wealthy countries in capital cities, because the machines are very large, very capital and maintenance intensive, and very expensive.

[Image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

It’s not equitable, you can’t roll them out in regional or low socio-economic places.

[Image changes to show a view looking down on the Earth, and then the images move through to show the University of Sydney buildings]

So, the project Nano-X was the brainchild of the head of the group there.

[Image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show a patient undergoing radiotherapy, and then the image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

And he’d come up with the idea that well to make the radiotherapy machines much, much cheaper, instead of having a patient lie down on a bed and have these huge, enormous gantries rotating basically an accelerator of x-rays around the patient, you could fix all of that equipment into a much smaller area and just rotate the patient themselves.

[Image move through to show a medium view of Ilana talking, researchers in conversation, an aerial view looking down on a model hospital, and then views of Ilana talking to the camera again]

And that had a load of great benefits in theory but in the process of talking to customers, and talking to patients, and talking to doctors and nurses, we realised over a period of several years, having a patient lying on their back, strapping them in with airbags and seatbelts, and then rotating them upside down and back was not ideal for the patient.

[Image changes to show a model of an upright patient position radiotherapy, and then the image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

Patients didn’t like it. They felt seasick, they felt claustrophobic and so over a period of time we realised that we had to find a different solution and that solution was in fact, sitting the patient upright and rotating them this way.

[Image changes to show a close view of the model of the upright patient model of radiotherapy]

And the patients themselves liked being upright.

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And so that was literally a pivot based on customer feedback.

[Image changes to show a medium view of Ilana sitting at a table talking to the camera]

Listening to your customers actually matters a lot.

[Images move through to show a close view of the CSIRO buildings, close and medium views of Ilana talking to the camera, and Ilana walking through a park and sitting down to work at the picnic table]

Change can be very stressful for lots of people, and I think there’s two different groups of people, people that naturally gravitate toward change, because maybe their risk appetite is a little higher and people that really naturally don’t gravitate towards change, and for those people any small changes are very, very stressful.

[Image changes to show a medium view of Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show Ilana working on a laptop at a picnic table]

The strategy I use now, is just to reflect on how stressed I was when I made those first big changes and that wasn’t moving from astronomy to medical devices.

[Image changes to show a close view of Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show a close view of Ilana working on a laptop at a picnic table]

That was a whole range of changes at school, and noting that when you reflect back, you know, a year later, the outcome of those changes is never the worst-case scenario that you thought.

[Image changes to show a medium and then close view of Ilana talking to the camera]

It’s always much scarier to think about doing it, than it is to do it.

[Image changes to show a satellite orbiting Earth]

[Images move through to show Ilana talking, a view looking down on the SKA array, a close view of a telescope, satellites streaking through the night sky, a diagram of Earth, and a satellite in orbit]

The last startup I was involved in out of CSIRO is called Quasar Satellite Technologies and basically, it’s a way of repurposing the equipment that we use in radio astronomy in detecting galaxies millions and billions of light years away, to do low earth orbit satellite communications, with all of the very fast satellites that are being launched today.

[Image changes to show a medium view of Ilana talking to the camera]

That’s what Quasar set up to do.

[Images move through to show views of a satellite orbiting Earth, satellites being tracked across the Earth’s orbit in a diagram, Ilana talking to the camera, and a radio telescope dish]

The benefit of using the astronomy technology enables you to track and measure many, many satellites, hundreds even, at the same time with the same piece of equipment, relative to what is used today for satellite communications which is a dish.

[Images move through to show various satellite dishes, and then the image changes to show a diagram of a satellite dish communicating with a satellite]

And every dish communicates with the one satellite at a time.

[Image changes to show a medium and then close view of Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show Ilana and a customer in conversation in a workshop]

And so, you go from being able to communicate with one satellite at a time to being able to communicate with potentially hundreds overhead at one time.

[Image changes to show a close view of Ilana’s hand touching the equipment, and then the image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

And that’s the big disruption in satellite communications that we can bring in from astronomy.

[Images move through to show a world globe, a digital world map, various views of radio telescopes in the day and also against night skies]

The space industry is a lot broader than what you might think.

[Images move through to show a hand operating an ATM, a person picking toilet paper from a shelf, a male having a Telehealth consultation with a doctor, and then Ilana talking to the camera]

You know every time you or your folks get money from an ATM, get your toilet paper delivered from Woolies in a lockdown, if you have a tele-health consultation because you live in the bush or you can’t be bothered going to the GP or whatever it is, that’s all enabled by Space.

[Image changes to show a medium view of Ilana talking to the camera]

So much of what we do is enabled by space.

[Images move through to show a view of an estuary, fires in a hilly area, a rocket launching, a satellite being discharged from a rocket, and the satellite in orbit]

Monitoring of the waterways, monitoring of bushfires is all Space, and that is growing in leaps and bounds.

[Image changes to show Ilana and a customer in conversation in a workshop, and then the image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera]

In order to manage the growth of the Space industry, of course, you need technology and engineering.

[Image changes to show a female in a spacesuit, and then the image changes to show a satellite orbiting the Earth]

But you need lawyers, humanities people who understand sociology of moving objects into Space and permanent bases on Space.

[Image changes to show Ilana talking to the camera, and then the image changes to show a close view of Ilana talking to the camera]

You need environmentalists, you need every walk of life because the industry itself, it touches everything, every sector. Agriculture, mining, banking, finance, environmentals are all going to be relying on data from space to give them more information about what it is that they want in their individual businesses, and for that you need everyone.

[Music plays and the image changes to show the CSIRO logo and text appears: CSIRO, Australia’s National Science Agency, Space Careers Wayfinder 2022 except where otherwise indicated, The Space Careers Wayfinder materials may be used, reproduced, communicated and adapted free of charge for non-commercial educational purposes provided by all acknowledgements associated with the material are retained, Space Careers Wayfinder is a collaboration between the CSIRO and ANU]

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