‘The best part is we never need to specify exactly how it will work,” says a prime ministerial staffer during an episode of ABC TV satire The Hollowmen. Policy adviser David Murphy, played by actor Lachy Hulme, is referring to the half-baked National Perpetual Endowment Fund he and others concocted to make their PM appear ”visionary”.
At Monday’s Senate estimates hearing, the real-world Labor Party could not resist pointing out the similarities between the fictitious fund and the government’s new Medical Research Future Fund – a budget night announcement that surprised just about everyone including the nation’s chief scientist and its presumed major beneficiary, the National Health and Medical Research Council.
”The policy development process reads more like a script for The Hollowmen than the way an ‘adult government’ conducts itself,” Labor health spokeswoman Catherine King said.
Video: Hollowmen – Future Fund
Few details about the new medical research fund have been released, except that it will be managed by the Peter Costello-led Future Fund board and will be financed in part by the $7 Medicare fee and cuts to hospital funding until it reaches $20 billion, which is expected in 2020.
Putting to one side the ethics of the scheme’s financing, a caveat that will likely stall the policy in the Senate, some see the fund’s sparse details as a blessing.
”The last thing we want is such a significant future fund to be dreamt up by people in Treasury and Finance,” says Simon McKeon, the chairman of the CSIRO. ”This fund really needs the wisest heads in all of government, but particularly in the health area, to get it right.”
McKeon’s view is not surprising given he was the lead architect of the Strategic Review of Health and Medical Research, known as the McKeon review, commissioned by the former Labor government and handed down last year. The report was commissioned to suggest ways health and medical research, which comes at considerable taxpayer expense, could better serve its citizens.
While Australia excels in basic medical research – as evidenced by multiple Nobel prizes and a significant contribution to GDP – the country struggles to translate a lot of that knowledge into therapies, medicines and services. To remedy this, one of the review’s major recommendations is to embed research within healthcare.
”Research must be routinely performed as a part of healthcare delivery and there must be greater linkage between healthcare providers and research organisations,” says McKeon.
Unsurprisingly, he hopes the key recommendations of the 300-page report, which has garnered support from both sides of politics, industry and the research sector, will be used by government to guide the new medical research future fund.
As one commentator described it, ”the McKeon review hasn’t been Gonskied”.
The University of Queensland may be synonymous with Ian Frazer and his cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil, but that is not its only blockbuster innovation. Other research-derived commercial successes include its superconductor technology, now used in two-thirds of the world’s MRI machines, and the Vaxxas Nanopatch, a needle-free vaccine that does not require cold storage.
At least 70 spin-off companies and more than $10 billion in product sales between 2007 and 2013 have come from the university’s research, much of it in the medical sciences, says Dr Dean Moss, the director of UniQuest, the university’s main commercialising company. But UQ’s commercial success is an isolated example in Australia, says Moss. One thing most people agree the new medical research future fund should do is to help translate more research discoveries.
While the NHMRC offers generous grants for scientists to conduct basic medical research, if someone has a bright idea with potential market value there are limited funds to flesh it out, build prototypes or conduct further ”proof of concept” tests before seeking partnerships with industry.
This early stage is known as the ”valley of death”, when smart ideas languish in the lab or are snaffled by overseas investors. One of Australia’s most famous lost opportunities involves the research of world renowned medical researcher Don Metcalfe, who discovered the molecules that boost infection-fighting white blood cells while at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.
When WEHI dropped the discovery’s patent it was picked up by a small US biotech that made $US1 billion in sales in 1994 alone. Of the roughly $9 billion of public money that goes to research and innovation each year, only about 2per cent is spent commercialising discoveries.
Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie says countries such as China spend billions on biotech, following the US research and commercialisation model. If Australia ignores this, our economy will be left behind, he says. ”Our grandchildren will become the waiters of Asia.”
To encourage better commercialisation, the McKeon review recommends a $250 million translational biotech fund be established for early-stage development that is jointly funded by government and the private sector. ”This fund would be an enormous assistance for dealing with that valley of death,” says McKeon.
Dr Anna Lavelle from industry group AusBiotech believes a matched-funding scheme would encourage more private sector money to flow into research and its translation, which would increase the likelihood that start-up companies and their jobs remain in Australia.
But Lavelle says the new fund should avoid replicating what the NHMRC does – spending most of its $800,000 annual budget to fund basic research – and focus at least 50per cent of its effort on applied research that can be commercialised. McKeon, on the other hand, thinks the fund should avoid focusing on creating the next wonder drug or implant and have a broad remit. The review suggests about 15 per cent of any new money be put aside for priority-driven research that attempts to solve specific health problems, such as indigenous Australians’ significantly shorter life expectancy.
Professor John Shine, the former director of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research and the chairman of the biopharmaceutical company CSL, says it’s about striking a balance between basic, translation and healthcare-based research. A strong link between medical research and general science is also essential, he says. ”You can’t translate something if you don’t have the basic knowledge to start with,” he says.
But a stronger focus on translational research would sway companies such as CSL, the maker of vaccines and blood-stimulating drugs, to invest more in local R&D, says Shine. This, in turn, would foster greater collaboration between researchers and industry – another reason why the country struggles to translate benchtop breakthroughs into commercial successes. Only 4 per cent of large Australian businesses collaborate with local universities, compared with 31.5per cent in the UK.
Moss says the lack of interaction means scientists conduct their research without knowing the problems industries face and the solutions they require. The research culture rewards scientists to publish their results in journals for their peers rather than patent their discovery.
Given that the role of co-operative research centres is to encourage industry and academia to mix to come up with creative solutions to problems, many say their $80 million budget is short-sighted. Cuts to several commercialisation programs don’t make sense either.
Commercialising research is expensive and industry is not going to invest big money if it doesn’t have a period of patent exclusivity, says Moss. Incentives should be offered to medical researchers who patent, a move that boosts the chance industry will show an interest.
The McKeon review said encouraging more doctors to dabble in research was a way to understand the needs of consumers, namely patients, and ensure the fruits of research flowed into healthcare. The report proposed 100 fellowships each year over 10 years that commit specialist clinicians to spend some of their time in research.
”I heard time and again from clinicians who would love to do it,” says McKeon.
Dr Leigh Farrell, the director of d3 Medicine, says clinician researchers are important but most lack the skills required in the early stages of developing a product or drug such as understanding the science of the product from a regulator’s perspective and how to conduct clinical tests and modelling. Without this commercial nous, researchers are tempted to licence their blockbuster discovery to a company too early without realising a little extra work would have dramatically increased its value, he says.
Farrell and his colleague Dr Craig Rayner say the new medical research fund should establish a facility where researchers can access people with early-stage product development skills. Health Minister Peter Dutton says his department is consulting with the research community about how the fund should work.
Source: The Age