Company leader
Michalis Papadakis
Co-founder and CEO
Brainomix
Michalis Papadakis is co-founder and chief executive of Brainomix, an Oxford, England company that makes AI software for reading stroke and lung scans. Hospitals use its Brainomix 360 Stroke software so their doctors can decide quickly which stroke patients need a clot removed or a transfer to a specialist center.
Education and research
He earned a bachelor's degree with honours in biochemistry from Imperial College London and a PhD in neurosciences from the UCL School of Pharmacy. He has spent more than two decades in the University of Oxford's academic and research world. He joined the university as an academic and worked on stroke through the Oxford Stroke Laboratory, and when he co-founded Brainomix he was scientific director of its preclinical stroke lab.
Business
Brainomix began as a University of Oxford spinout. Papadakis told Entrepreneur UK that he and his co-founders started from a clinical problem, not from AI: many stroke patients miss treatment because decisions are delayed when a specialist is not on hand. "The technology was a means to an end, and the end is the clinical unmet need," he said.
He leads Brainomix's management team, commercial strategy, fundraising, and corporate partnerships, and the company says he has raised £49 million of private investment and public funding. Its software has been deployed to more than 300 hospitals in more than 20 countries, and its e-Lung software for lung fibrosis is cleared by the FDA.
He has made published evidence the center of how Brainomix sells to health systems. "We don't just claim that we are improving patient care, but we can back it up with hard evidence," he said. A study in The Lancet Digital Health of more than 450,000 patients at 107 NHS England hospitals found that thrombectomy rates doubled at the hospitals using Brainomix 360 Stroke. He has also said the software is meant "not to replace a physician, but to assist and augment them."