When Robert Klupacs set the company up in 2018, the plan said FDA approval by 2030. It came through in April 2025.

The device is a brain-monitoring implant, built on cochlear implant technology, that watches for seizures continuously. Before it, the gold standard for epilepsy care was a patient writing episodes down in a notebook afterwards, if they remembered them at all. Professor Mark Cook had the idea 25 years ago and found it so frustrating that he went looking for engineers who could build it. That company, Epiminder, listed on the ASX and raised $125 million.

Robert Klupacs is CEO of the Bionics Institute, the Melbourne organisation behind the cochlear implant. He has been involved in 29 companies and sat on 45 boards across stem cells, cancer drugs, a bionic eye and the implant above. He joined the Institute nine years ago to find it losing money and losing direction.

His father was interned by the Russians after the war. He escaped, was shot in the shoulder, and collapsed in the Austrian Alps where the Americans found him. He recovered, reached Holland, then emigrated alone to Australia in 1951 and worked the factories of Geelong. Four years later he wrote to the woman he had met and asked her to come and marry him. She came.

He died at 52, six months after the only photograph Robert has of the two of them together. Robert was fifteen. He brings that photograph to this conversation.

With Kenneth Cutbush he traces the whole route: a scholarship to school in Geelong, becoming the fifth employee of a Victorian government biotech at twenty-two and being sent to advise the country's best scientists on intellectual property while knowing barely more than they did, and lobbying to change the law so corporate patent attorneys could register.

The most useful section for any researcher is his argument about publishing. He has watched at least four significant Australian opportunities disappear because an academic put up a conference poster without realising they had just destroyed their own patent position. His question is blunt: you say you want impact, so why are you publishing?

And there is the other side of it. Diane, the first recipient of the bionic eye, seeing shapes again. A boy implanted at two who became the first AFL-listed footballer with a cochlear implant and now works at the Institute. And a group of children in South Australia whose implants were never properly tuned, who reached school age with developmental problems that should never have happened.

Chapters

  • 00:01 The only photograph he has of his father
  • 01:50 Welcome. 29 companies, 45 boards
  • 03:04 A scholarship, and three offers to choose between
  • 03:58 His father's escape, and the wound in the Alps
  • 05:14 A letter to Holland, four years later
  • 05:34 A migrant family, and risks he would never take
  • 06:38 What he thought he would become
  • 07:43 A fascination with drugs, and a plan to go to Europe
  • 09:24 The fifth employee, aged 22
  • 10:06 Advising the best scientists in the country, knowing almost nothing
  • 11:07 Learning molecular biology from Nobel-calibre mentors
  • 13:18 One of four people in a new intellectual property course
  • 14:21 Lobbying to change the law so he could register
  • 15:41 Finding opportunity before the internet existed
  • 18:12 Introversion, performance and imposter syndrome
  • 19:07 Taking an institute from $7 million to $30 million
  • 20:50 Moving the family to Singapore
  • 24:55 A drug that raised a billion dollars and failed phase three
  • 26:06 The heartbreak nobody accounts for
  • 31:03 Walking into the Bionics Institute
  • 33:31 Brand awareness, and learning to do deals
  • 34:45 Curiosity-driven research versus directed research
  • 36:52 Who owns the intellectual property
  • 40:11 "Why do you want to publish all the time?"
  • 43:47 Four opportunities lost to a conference poster
  • 44:53 Nobody tells a PhD student this
  • 45:28 Diane, and the first bionic eye
  • 46:30 The footballer implanted at two
  • 48:49 The children whose implants were never properly tuned
  • 51:22 Why the audiologist matters as much as the surgeon
  • 51:46 Epiminder, and FDA approval five years early
  • 55:51 A seven-minute warning before a seizure
  • 58:47 Girls in STEM
  • 60:13 500 girls, 43 mentors, 27 schools
  • 62:10 Why Australia invents brilliantly and commercialises badly
  • 63:05 Nobody teaches Australian students how to sell
  • 64:11 Advice to a fifteen-year-old girl listening
  • 66:22 The photograph, and what it still asks of him