Mike Brady: From robots to mammography

Mike Brady: not technology for it’s own sake.

Unimpressed by the diagnostic tools available to treat breast cancer, Brady started to work on medical imaging, particularly mammography. This time he set out with the end goal in mind. Not for him technology for its own sake: he wanted to improve patient care.

With the research delivering promising results, Brady raised £1 million to start a business that would bring his new imaging diagnostics to the mammography market. He immediately upset investors by blowing a quarter of the money on a stand at a trade show in the US. But that proved to be a very wise move.

When they got to the show, a coming-together of anybody who was anybody in medical imaging, Brady’s team had two things to show on its stand. As well as the imaging system, the other “product” was an image fusion technology, a software tool for image alignment and analysis. This was, Brady now admits, “lashed together and didn't really work but we didn’t really tell anybody”. They assembled the second demonstration partly because they did not want to look like a one-trick business.

Guess which product caught the eyes of the visitors. “What we discovered in three days, from several hundred customers, was that they didn’t give a monkey’s about mammography, but they thought the fusion stuff was great. We got back to base at the end of that week and we stopped every single piece of work on mammography and we threw everything into getting FDA approval for our work on image fusion.”

Listen to the customer

The lesson Brady draws from this is that you have to listen to customers. By listening, Brady sold the company that grew out of this technology, Mirada, to one of its own customers, a business that itself was acquired by Siemens.

It wasn’t just the money that fired up Brady. He is passionate about seeing his technology out in the world. “Believe me, I have written hundreds of research papers. Nothing comes close to watching your stuff being used to diagnose and treat a patient.”

Not that it was all plain sailing. For Brady the crunch was when the company he had set up to commercialise his research on medical imaging came within two weeks of not being able to pay the wages bill. A major investor “tried to screw us,” as Brady puts it. “They tried to take 70 per cent of the company for peanuts.”

Brady was not happy with this ploy. “I won’t tell you what we said but the second word was ‘off’. We went around and we met every single investor individually: we told them what was happening, what our story was, what the future was. We raised £750,000 in two days.”

When you have to sack your former students

Running a company also raises challenges that you don’t usually encounter as an engineering professor, especially when things start to go wrong. “If you are the chairman and founder of the company you find yourself in a very nasty position of having to fire not only friends but your colleagues and students, firing your former students. But if you have got 20 or 30 people working for the company you have just got to do it.” This is not, says Brady, something that most academics are good at.

Brady is not alone in their passion to see things out into the world. A lot has changed in the two decades since his days as a maverick spinner-out of academic research. Now, he says, there are hundreds of academics who want to see their work in the marketplace. He sees the same entrepreneurial thinking in his graduate students, postdocs – even among undergraduates.

The enthusiasm has even permeated into Oxford, which came later to the entrepreneurial game than some universities – no one talks about “the Oxford phenomenon”. “There is a fantastic entrepreneurial culture in Oxford, in crusty old Oxford. My department had two spin-outs ten years ago. There are now fifteen, none of which has not succeeded. The university has spun out seventy-odd companies in the past ten years. And that is just one place. The same is true of Imperial College. The same is true of Cambridge. The same is true of other places.”

If anything, says Brady, the UK’s universities are the envy of the world when it comes to entrepreneurial thinking. “The entrepreneurial culture now is certainly the envy of Europe and, to be honest, is also the envy of the United States.”