M a r i a n n e B L a c k
co - Founder ,
director and
adVisor , arButus
Medical inc.
age: 26
the story: Sometimes,
good intentions turn into
a good business plan. For
Marianne Black, a former
UBC grad student in bio-
medical engineering, it
was a cheap drill. A typical
surgical drill costs roughly
$30,000; while manage-
able for North American
hospitals, in countries like
Uganda, it's an expense they
can ill afford. The solution:
special drill covers for typical
hardware-store drills that can
be properly sanitized. "We
want to make sure that every
surgeon who needs a surgical
drill can afford one," says
Black, who co-founded the
project and the five-person
company that spawned from
it, Vancouver-based Arbutus
Medical, in 2013. Black, who
grew up in a very mathemati-
cal family—her parents were
high-school math teachers
and her brother is a civil
engineer—is now doing her
PhD in mechanical engineer-
ing at Stanford University.
Yet even from California, she
remains active in Arbutus,
with plans to help the com-
pany expand further into
Africa and beyond (each new
country has its own regula-
tory hurdles) and develop
more medical devices for
cash-strapped hospitals. "We
have other ideas," Black says.
"We don't want to be a one-
hit wonder."
Markers oF success:
Black began the project
during her master's at
UBC
and by the summer of 2013
had deployed the drill cover
to hospitals in Uganda; by
fall, her team was invited
to speak to 30 surgeons in
San Francisco. The covers
are now employed in seven
countries, with Syria recently
added ("being a conflict zone,
this is really important"); the
team is also in contact with
"people in China and India
who are very interested." In
Uganda alone, roughly 2,000
patients have already been
treated using their technol-
ogy, she says.
—T.M.
a l i t t l e - k n o w n F a c t a B o u t M e i s…
"I'm a huge Harry Potter fan. I've gone to the
midnight release of the last four books"
54 BCBusiness april 2015
Canada Wide
SUBMITTED FILES
File Name Original Name Preflight Note
AD008267_01.pdf Deloitte.PDF
AD008267Info.pdf
photo courtesy arbutus medical inc.
