Five minutes’ worth of inspiration

By Andrew McKenna

Castlemaine and its surrounding areas are renowned for … inventors? You mightn’t think so, but an inventor living near Castlemaine has come up with a device that might just revolutionise the care of some cancer patients. And there’s the revamped two-stroke engine as well…

‘I was there for one month and I managed to save them two million dollars,’ he said of a company he worked for in the States when he was not long out of mechanical engineering at Swinburne.

Did they give him a cut?

‘No!’

Michael Chandler has been living for six years in Chewton.  He came from Brunswick with his family on a circuitous route, Portland, Maine, and Manly in Sydney.

‘I never got round to saving for or buying a house in Melbourne,’ he said.

‘When I graduated I got a job in Sydney, and we lived in Manly. We didn’t buy in Sydney, we rented because we were half talking about coming back to Melbourne.’

Once their first baby – Sam, now playing soccer in the Under 12s – came along Kris realised she needed to be near her family, so they returned to Melbourne.

When he graduated his father arranged for him to come and work in the US with him at a  medical diagnostics company called In Vitro Diagnostics.

That was where his innovation saved the firm big dollars.

He had been working in [designed and built] the largest driest room in the Southern Hemisphere, like an Australian summer probably, when the snot in your nose crackles into dry little stalactites.

‘We were running between 5-10 per cent humidity, and even to monitor at that range is difficult,’ Michael said.

But the firm needed their cardboard to be even drier, and they were spending a fortune on the problem. His solution? Stick it in the microwave first.

The founder of the company’s operation in Sydney asked Michael to return to Australia, so he ended up being in the States for only a month of work and a month of holiday, driving those big freeways in a Kombi with Kris.

He had spent four years growing up in Ontario, as his father was a molecular biologist, specialising in immunology, so he gravitated to the firms doing that kind of work.

He spent five years and five days in Sydney working for ICT Diagnostics, and the company went from eight or nine employees up to fifty during that period. The company was set up to commercialise technology and research coming from universities.

‘We licensed the technology from the USA,’ he said.

Their rights were for Third World countries, and they worked on a range of tropical infectious diseases, on ways to come up with high volume, low cost diagnostic kits.

They’d been making around 12,000 a day in the US when they were at full capacity. Michael redesigned their every nut and bolt and got the company up to 180,000 a day. They’d do a month’s work in a morning, and then look at each other and wonder what to do next.

‘It was insane,’ he laughs.

‘Very courageous is the polite term, but it worked.’

Dealing with the Third World, however, he describes as a nightmare.

The company was contracted to Thailand, the Philippines, Sierra Leone and other African nations, working mostly on malaria testing kits.

Corruption cripples the country and at the end of the day if you have principles it is difficult do business there.

He recalls that they had to strike up deals with the wives of politicians, free trips for the delegates’ wives.

‘It was bizarre, and the end result was that nothing was ever clinched.  Corruption cripples the country and at the end of the day if you have principles you can’t do business there.

‘We were doing great things, and then Amrad took over. They were very corporate minded, with performance reviews, Key Performance Indicators, etc. For certain people it can be valuable, but for others it can be a degrading and humiliating experience. I just despised it and I thought I was definitely not cut out for this.

‘My plan had always been to move to the country and run my own business.’

So he moved with his family back to Melbourne. By that stage his father had established Enterix to commercialise a test for bowel cancer, and they needed high speed fully automated manufacturing and test processing equipment.

‘I thought, I’ll get stuck into this, and the next day Chandler Automation was born. It’s not a particularly inventive name, but I chose it very quickly.’

He initially rented a factory in East Brunswick, hired the machines and had a staff of just two.

‘It was full of stuff. I have a bad habit of collecting stuff.’

‘One of his first jobs was to build a 10-metre long fully automated assembly machine to produce 8000 tests/hour.

He says he doesn’t like to be in a competitive situation in manufacturing; it’s not where his skills are, and within four or five years anyway the industry was becoming flooded with cheap manufactures from China.

‘I felt it was better to stick to something specialised for which I could charge a premium, because no one else would go there, or were silly enough to go there,’ he said.

An old fan in Michael's workshop

Another of his jobs around that time was for a Sydney-based technology firm out of the University of Sydney: a machine that literally bent the light. A diagnostic test for leukaemia had great potential, but the boffins were stuck with white cells on a white background, and they couldn’t see the cells.

‘I swore it would be my last patent, writing patents was so convoluted. The language was just weird.’

But he got it done with the help of a patent attorney, and now he’s made around thirty machines for them and they appear in labs and hospitals all over the world.

‘I much prefer building things on the small scale,’ he said.

‘I just recently lodged the patent for a cell separating machine, which separates circulating tumour cells.’

These days the research into genetic markers is huge, and they needed a way to separate tumour cells. Michael and his father came up with a device that works brilliantly. They put eight cells into ten millilitres of blood (which holds far too many billion cells to count) and Michael’s machine pulled out all eight.

The machine may hold a possibility for treatment, but it is currently used as a diagnostic toolkit, for early detection, and a valuable tool to keep a track on how treatment is working. Some people respond very well to therapies, others don’t, and counting the number of tumour cells is an ideal way to monitor the effectiveness of the treatment. His test is now generating a lot of interest around the world.

So he’s building his second machine, and guesses there’s another ten or so to come over the next six months. From there he is likely to turn it over to an industrial design company to get them mass produced.

What does it take to come up with a better way of doing something? I ask him.

‘About five minutes,’ he laughs.

‘You never know when inspiration is going to hit. The design has evolved a lot, but it’s also devolved. We started with something much more complex and I’ve just been stripping stuff out of it.

He says he was lying on a couch years ago kicking around a problem with a folding machine, thinking ‘what am I going to do – and then it just came to me. I put it together the next day and it worked perfectly.’

You never know when that moment’s going to hit. You can’t force it.

Another night he woke up and filled a notepad till 4am, and the solution was all there.

‘You never know when that moment’s going to hit. You can’t force it. When you think about it a lot sooner or later your brain comes up with a combination and it clicks and off it goes.’

And what is mechanical engineering? When I was a student I couldn’t have separated a mechanical engineer from a sound engineer.

‘I think mostly it’s a practical output for the physical sciences,’ he said.

‘Certain things are discovered, taken by engineers and turned into useful stuff. Engines and power plants. Anything that moves is basically mechanical engineering.

‘As a kid I was always interested in designing cars and engines, so it seemed like a not bad thing to do.’

He’s also working on a two-stroke engine to ‘revolutionise transport as we know it.’

Two-strokes are loud, bad, inefficient. He reckons his invention will have the fuel economy and the emissions of a four-stroke, at half the size.

And after years of work for blokes and chicks in white coats, he has a certain degree of respect for cancer – the way it modifies the body environment to suit itself, the way it can inhibit the body’s immune system, how it promotes its own blood supply to feed itself.

How do you beat that? I ask him.

‘Eat fruit!’ he says.