Jane Prentice (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am truly fortunate to represent an electorate that contains some of the most brilliant medical researchers in our country. I have spoken before in this place about several exciting research projects that have been generated by experts at the University of Queensland. I have spoken about Professor Jurgen Gotz and his team and their breakthrough in non-invasive ultrasound technology, showing promise in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. I have spoken of Ian Frazer and his Gardasil vaccine that has revolutionised the prevention of cervical cancer. I have spoken on several occasions about the nano patch, a new needle-free vaccine delivery mechanism that will be a game-changer in disease prevention, particularly in the developing world.

We often hear in the media from fundraising groups and from researchers themselves about potential breakthroughs in the prevention, treatment or cure of many common diseases. Indeed, with the significant enhancements in research methods such as computerised modelling and advances in genomics, there is no shortage of new and exciting research being published. In the area of basic research, Australia punches above its weight. With just 0.3 per cent of the world's population, we manage to produce three per cent of the world's research. But in reality only a small fraction of promising research ever ends up completing the process of becoming a commercially available drug.

The majority of great ideas simply fall by the wayside. Some do not progress for perfectly valid reasons such as failed clinical trials. But for many more, development slows to a halt as victims of a phase of development, some researchers have darkly termed the 'valley of death'. The more technical term for this phrase of drug development is translational medical research. Turning a good idea into a product is a multistage process. Research must proceed through many time-consuming stages before research reaches market, including several stages of clinical trials. It is not uncommon for the entire process to take a decade or more.

This is a costly process. Researchers require funding to further their work. Once research passes from an idea to a potentially marketable commodity, funding is often no longer available from research institutes and universities. So researchers turn to pharmaceutical companies for backing. But these companies are risk-averse and, with limited research and development funding, they will only back the drugs that have the greatest chance of commercial success in relation to development cost, with an inherent bias towards drugs already approaching the end of the development cycle.

In Australia, this problem is compounded by two additional challenges. The first is our demographic: Australia has a small population compared to the United States and Europe. This means a smaller pool of patients from which to draw participants in clinical trials, which can delay trials or result in them being conducted overseas.

The second challenge is an underdeveloped venture capital market in Australia, which suffers in comparison particularly with the United States. Again, this is partly due to a smaller population meaning a smaller funding market. But it is also fair to say that there is a general lack of appetite among institutional investors to invest in high-risk—but high-reward—ventures such as medical advances.

Recently I had the pleasure of visiting the Institute of Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in my electorate of Ryan. While I was there I met some very talented Australian researchers making truly awe-inspiring discoveries that could eventually be of life-changing benefit to people worldwide. There I was told that there can be no innovation without discovery of new knowledge. However, the trick is to get the balance right between generating knowledge and generating innovative outcomes.

Unfortunately, at present we do not appear to have the balance right. At the institute, promising research into new treatments for chronic pain, stroke, inflammation, cancer, obesity, diabetes, asthma, Parkinson's, liver fibrosis and many other diseases and illnesses is at risk of never getting out of the laboratory due to a lack of funding sources.

It is clear is that there is a funding gap between laboratory research and the market. In Australia this gap means that we are losing some of our best and brightest researchers, along with their intellectual property and lifesaving advances, to other countries. Australia is missing out on new home-grown, job-creating, knowledge-based industries. And in some cases, the world is missing out on what would otherwise be the next great medical advances because researchers simply give up on some projects altogether due to a lack of funding.

Thankfully, there may be good news ahead. Just last month, the Business Review Weekly magazine reported that Brandon Capital Partners has raised the largest ever venture capital commitment in Australian's history. A total of $200 million has been raised from four Australian pension funds to invest in a range of small life science companies. These companies are researching new treatments for everything from heart failure to golden staph and even a new vaccine for peanut allergy. The fund aims to find the new cochlear ear, CSL or ResMed—and here's hoping they do so.

More investment is one thing, but we also need to get better at removing other barriers to translational medical research. Part of this process is engineering a cultural shift within the research field itself. Chief Scientist, Ian Chubb, is on record, lamenting the breakdown in linkages between basic research and clinical research. He says that while in the past medical research was conducted by physician-scientists who also treated patients, these days the majority of biomedical research is done by highly-specialised PhD scientists who have never seen a patient.

In a sense we are becoming victims of our own success. The explosion in medical knowledge in recent decades has naturally led to increasing complexity and therefore increasing specialisation among researchers. The challenge now is encourage collaboration among researchers, to allow them to think beyond their narrow fields of research. Modern medical challenges are complex and span multiple fields of research. They require researchers to share research and to work together in an industry in which there is a financial incentive to protect intellectual property.

In a market in which financial incentives are working against the common interest in bringing research into production, there is a role for government to break down the silos and create an environment in which translational medical research can flourish. But the industry is—to borrow a phrase—looking for a 'hand up' and not a 'hand out'.

The National Health and Medical Research Council is increasingly moving beyond its traditional support for pure research and is now also focusing on translational research. A research translation faculty has been established to assist the council to address the key challenges of translation in the Australian market. Funding is also available for partnership projects to encourage collaboration between decision makers, policy makers, managers, clinicians and researchers. The $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund will also eventually have a transformational effect on Australian medical research and has the potential to assist in improving the translation of research from benchtop to patient.

At a state level translational research is also becoming an increased focus. In Queensland the Translational Research Institute opened in 2012 on the Princess Alexandra Hospital campus in Brisbane. It is the largest medical research institute in the Southern Hemisphere. It houses four institutes and is funded by the state and federal governments, philanthropic contribution and universities, including the University of Queensland. It is a great example of collaboration—indeed, one that sets the standard for others to follow.

Some great work is also being done in New South Wales, with the release last year of a dedicated health and medical research hub strategy that charts a new course of promoting collaboration and research translation. The state funded Cancer Institute of New South Wales also has a grant funding scheme dedicated to translational research, with more than $14 million provided to cancer researchers in 2014.

For a nation that prides itself on the quality of our researchers and our pure research we can do a lot better in supporting our researchers to bring their ideas to market. While governments of all persuasions at state and federal level have begun to recognise this shortfall and are taking steps to remedy it, the nature of the industry means that achieving results will require sustained commitment from government over many years. Supporting translational medical research will be an ongoing challenge; however, as elected representatives we owe it to our researchers, such as Professor Brandon Wainwright's team at the IMB at the University of Queensland, and indeed to the people of Australia to see this challenge through.

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