Award-winning Toxinz, which represents the poisons centre's database for sales, already provides 250 subscriptions, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, to hospitals and other centres throughout Australia, Canada and Singapore.
Through the World Health Organisation, Toxinz supplies the database free to 110 developing countries, while some subscriptions cover a provincial government's entire hospital system.
The University of Otago's commercialisation company, Otago Innovation, is operating global subscription sales of the Toxinz database. The university continues to operate the separate National Poisons Centre, which is part-funded by the Ministry of Health.
The Poisons Centre now has 190,000 items on its database, ranging from poisonous industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals, to snakes, household products and mushrooms, Otago Innovation chief executive Colin Dawson said.
''There's something like 12 types of brown snakes in Australia; we've got them all,'' Mr Dawson said.
Last week, in the inaugural KiwiNet Research Commercialisation Awards, Toxinz won the commercial deal award.
It was one of 12 finalists vying for four divisional awards.
In its third financial year, Toxinz expects to be turning over more than $500,000 in subscriptions, which will be ploughed back into research and into developing SmartPhone and iPad access, Mr Dawson said.
''We want to be able to deliver a mobile function... for example, a doctor on-ward can check on treatments, instead of by computer,'' he said. Toxinz is represented in every Australian state and the Northern Territory, five Canadian provinces and in Singapore, generally in hospitals, poison centres but also universities.
''The key was being able to `Australianise' the data, their snakes and jelly fish and [household chemical] brands,'' Mr Dawson said.
In New Zealand, the majority of annual Poisons Centre calls were prompted by the urgent need for information on non-prescription painkillers and anti-inflammatories and household cleaning agents, he said.
The key attribute for Toxinz' increasing popularity was its flexibility, in that the addition of new or updated information could be prioritised, and if necessary, placed in all the subscribed databases immediately.
''If something changes [with treatment instructions] it is done straight away,'' Mr Dawson said.
The Poisons Centre database was looked at by Otago Innovation about seven years ago and went into Toxinz in 2006.
Mr Dawson said the first change was to upgrade the software for commercial application, alter the page layout to make it more user-friendly and develop its search engine. Recently, Massachusetts-based Ebsco, which has 350 staff worldwide and offers 350,000 databases for distribution, contacted Otago Innovation, having become aware of its increasing sales.
A global distribution agreement was recently signed with Ebsco, which begins its United States sales programme this week, without the need for it to be updated with US-specific information, which could be added as collated, Mr Dawson said.
At present, Australian subscription sales totalled more than $A400,000 ($NZ474,500) annually, and US sales could build to ''several million'', which would include targeting businesses within the hazardous-chemical sector, Mr Dawson said.
On its KiwiNet win, a judge noted Toxinz was a ''case study'' in monetising previously undervalued assets''It illustrates that simple ideas are often the best ideas, and how you are able to derive great value from data,'' the judge said.
• Other KiwiNet Research commercialisation award winners. -
Commercialisation collaboration award: Callaghan Innovation - Ovine Automation Consortium.
Researcher entrepreneur award: Profs John Boys and Grant Covic, electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Auckland.
Research and business partnership award: Callaghan Innovation - Advanced Sonar Technology.
People's choice award: AUT - Growing the New Zealand surf clam industry with the Cloudy Bay Group.
