Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Ryan for putting this motion forward and highlighting the emerging tsunami of precision medicine that's occurring around the world in developed countries. I will, if I can, digress a little. I was a medical student in the early 1970s. Since my time as a medical student, we've seen some dramatic changes in the way medicine is practised. When I started my training, the survival rate for the commonest form of childhood leukaemia, acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, was well under 40 per cent using only a few simple medications. These days, with a whole change of different treatments, up to and including bone marrow transplant, survival rates are now over 90 per cent—a dramatic change. In my time as a paediatrician in the early 1980s, I saw children diagnosed with an intellectual disability. The cause of the intellectual disability was unknown for about 90 per cent of children with intellectual disability. These days, it's now under 40 per cent with advances in genetics.

So there have been dramatic changes in the way that we look at the human body and the way that we look at genetics, and this has led to precision medicine. Probably the commonest form of precision medicine is blood transfusion. We've gone from screening for the simple blood groups, A, B, O and AB, to now screening for hundreds of different antigens and making blood transfusion much less prone to side effects and much more effective.

The practice of precision medicine is gaining significant attention, even in the times of COVID-19, as it's proving that the simple ways of doing medicine are no longer viable in these pandemic days. Precision medicine has achieved through its methodology new advancements in treatments like that pioneered by my friend Professor John Rasco, from the University of Sydney, who has developed a new genetic treatment for haemophilia B, the second most common form of haemophilia. It's a one-off treatment that is curative for life. So these children no longer need regular factor infusions every second day of their lives. They're no longer prone to the side effects of these products and they're no longer prone to recurrent bleeding, causing joint deformity and other major disabilities.

I believe that developments in the field of precision medicine will be monumental in developed countries like Australia. It will change the whole way that we approach the practice of medicine. I join with the member for Ryan in encouraging greater funding and support from the federal government and also from private enterprise to be provided to researchers and professionals studying precision medicine. My seat of Macarthur was the early birthplace and schooling place of Professor Graeme Clark, who developed the bionic ear. This is now even more precise in its management. It's now being used in children much younger than 12 months of age and is now also being used in older people. Precision medicine has a variety of expressions, and the cochlear implant is one of those.

There is a rare fatal childhood disease called Leigh syndrome. The genetic basis for this metabolic disorder has been extensively studied at Melbourne Royal Children's Hospital and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. They have found a number of different genetic causes and will be targeting specific treatments to these genetic causes. With cystic fibrosis, there is a whole range of specific genetic treatments for each mutation now available, giving children with cystic fibrosis, a disease often fatal in early adult life, the possibility of leading a life towards normal life expectancy and a normal physical life. So there have been dramatic changes. We are now able to identify the genes for many metabolic disorders, and targeted medications will be available. So I thank the member for Ryan. It's a really great motion and I fully support it.

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