Sir Peter Hunter, founder of the Auckland Bioengineering Institute, makes the work sound easy: “We use physics and maths to try to understand the physiology of the human body.”
Together with Prof Bruce Smaill, he founded the ABI to make this happen, resulting in numerous discoveries and spinouts and, in the 2024 King’s Honours, a knighthood for Hunter for his services to medical science.
Hunter – “No, not Sir Peter, just Peter” – is self-effacing when asked yet again to recount the successes over those 23 years. They are many and diverse, attesting to ABI’s expertise and culture under his leadership. There are 25 spinout companies, physiome modelling, the Te Tītoki Mataora (TTM) MedTech Research Translator, the Cloud9 startup hub, the MedTech Centre of Research Excellence, virtual twins, numerous awards for ABI and individuals, establishment of the Consortium for Medical Device Technologies (CMDT)…the list goes on. All of the medtech-related initiatives have been in conjunction with Dr Di Siew and, says Peter, “their success is much more to do with her than him”.
“We made a conscious decision when forming the ABI to focus on both basic bioengineering research and its translation to clinical outcomes via spinout companies.. These companies offer employment opportunities for our graduates and help justify the NZ$100million in investment funding in the institute we’ve received over the last 20-plus years.”
When asked how these successes happened, Hunter talks about the culture of ABI as being absolutely crucial. “It isn’t a top-down culture; rather it’s a collegial environment where people want to work together, where they have a shared vision, where they think beyond just the technology and understand the need to help each other in achieving our goals.”
An article in The University of Auckland’s Mātātaki | The Challenge focuses on researchers who are taking on the big challenges facing New Zealand and the world. The ABI’s first deputy director Bruce Smaill sums it up brilliantly.
“Almost no one leaves.” In 2021, the ABI calculated that 34 percent, or 102 of its academic and professional staff, were alumni. Mark Trew is one of the staffers who started working with Hunter in the 1990s and 2000s – and is still at the ABI.”
That same article attests to Hunter’s own style. Marco Viceconti, Professor of Computational Biomechanics at the University of Bologna, Italy, received funding from the European Commission for a project he called “STEP: Seeding the EuroPhysiome” and approached Hunter to chair the international scientific advisory committee.
“He could have easily reacted in an adversarial way. At that point, he had been preaching the Physiome vision for more than ten years. The ABI was light years ahead of anyone else in building digital humans, and Peter was the recognised leader of this emerging field we now call in-silico medicine."
“On the contrary, he enthusiastically accepted my invitation, opened his portfolio of international contacts to me, and tutored me in the delicate art of scientific consensus. Peter is full of qualities, but the one I like most is his ability to bring people together and guide them to achieve things that alone would have been inconceivable. The ABI is the perfect example of this quality.”
As happens with many researchers, where they end up isn’t where they thought they might be going, and Hunter is one of these people.
“I did an undergraduate degree and I needed a master’s topic. An inspiring lecturer, Mike O’Sullivan Snr, suggested I study blood flow because you can apply the equations of fluid mechanics to understanding blood flow.” A whole new world opened up for Hunter, leading to a PhD at Oxford in a physiology department.
Much has been written about Hunter’s work over the years, from his virtual heart through to the 12 Labours project to map and understand our 12 organ systems aimed at creating a personalised digital model of a real, virtual human and, most recently, the MedTech iQ innovation quarter in Auckland. In one interview, there simply isn’t enough time to cover a fraction of these projects. Hunter talks about genetics, the cellphone, computers, the human genome, computing databases, personalised medicine, clinical pipelines, mathematical models, algorithms, tools to handle complexity, how we must never under-estimate the social aspect of people, opportunities for investors, the social media effect on children, our openness to a broad base of funding….
Hunter may have a singular vision but it is by no means limited vision and we are the better for that.
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