Crafting college spinouts into successful ventures can be tricky business, but it helps if you land a national award to help offset R&D costs. SiriusXT a UCD spinout, claimed the title of ‘Best Early Stage Company In Ireland’ at this year’s InterTrade Ireland Seedcorn competition, securing a cash prize of €50,000.

Incorporated in October 2015, SiriusXT was co-founded by Dr Kenneth Fahy, Dr Fergal O’Reilly and Dr Paul Sheridan, as a spinout from UCD’s School of Physics. Though it’s newly minted, CEO Tony McEnroe says that it took eight years to develop the technology for the firm’s flagship product, a soft x-ray microscope called SXT.

SXT is a benchtop system that allows researchers to produce images in their own labs. It takes a powerful laser to make a little fireball as hot as the centre of the sun and about a tenth of the width of a human hair in diameter.

This fireball produces a kind of light that allows them to illuminate single cells or tissue samples and produce detailed 3D images of cells that cannot be produced any other way.

Patented Technology

McEnroe brings considerable business experience to SiriusXT. He is currently centre director of the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce, and was an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist in 2005 while MD of Farran Technology. He says that SiriusXT’s patented technology will give biologists and drug developers a completely new 3D view of the cells and tissue that diseases and drugs act on.

In Association with

The route to market for SiriusXT will be through disease researchers from Europe and the US. “We will target existing SXT users first, since they know the value of the technology and have already indicated their interest in acquiring a system when it is available.”

McEnroe says that college spinouts such as SiriusXT have a number of challenges to overcome, not least of which is ensuring that the product has commercial appeal. “The focus of academic research is often the demonstration of a technology innovation by building a prototype through the fastest means possible.

"Such prototypes do not always form the basis for a product that can be operated reliably and can be easily serviced. For this reason, the cost and time required to take the prototype to a commercial product is often underestimated.”

Academic Culture

McEnroe also notes that research timescales and product development timescales are very different things, and the latter need to be more predictable and tightly managed. “For this reason, it is very difficult to carry out research and product development in the same cultural environment.

"Moving the product development team out of the academic research environment often helps the team to make the transition to a commercial business.”

Another key challenge in making spinouts a success seems to have been partially addressed in SiriusXT by having McEnroe on board, providing the entrepreneurial experience.

McEnroe adds: “A business and commercial team who are sensitive to the cultural divide and/or who have already been through this before can be a significant help in developing a more commercial culture for the startup.”

Pictured are Dr Kenneth Fahy (left) and Tony McEnroe