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$250 million for translating medical research into real benefits

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The Australian Government will invest $250 million over two years to help translate Australian health and medical research into commercial reality as part of the National Innovation and Science Agenda (NISA). This investment will provide the funds to improve the quality of life of Australians.

The Biomedical Translation Fund alongside the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) will make investments in promising discoveries. A selection process will analyse the merits of proposals, including the expected costs and benefits.

Minister for Health, Sussan Ley, said that funding, resources and expertise are needed to ensure these research findings can be translated into real benefits for people in the form of better devices, drugs and treatments. Bringing new biomedical discoveries to market is complex and expensive, and if these ‘invisible ideas’ are not developed, the health or economic benefits would never be seen.

According to Minister Ley, investing in the early stages of commercialisation will open the research pipeline from the laboratory bench to the patient’s bedside. Researchers, clinicians, industry, governments and, especially, patients will benefit from research ideas succeeding commercially.

‘It’s great to see the fruition of so much consultation and advocacy come together in this new agenda’ said Elizabeth Foley, Research Australia CEO at the time of the announcement by the government.

‘Particularly pleasing is the announcement of the new science and innovation cabinet committee, which puts innovation and science policy at the heart of government where it belongs’ said Ms Foley.

‘The Prime Minister has talked about the need to create an innovation culture and the
Government’s announcements today take us along the right path.’

‘The announcement of the Translational Biotechnology Fund (TBF) will certainly help to meet the need to commercialise great new Australian research. While it will be funded with two instalments of $125 million from the funding earmarked for the MRFF, we welcome the commitment that the MRFF will still be fully funded to $20 billion by 2019/20.’

Most of the new funding of $1.1 billion, which is in addition to the $250m TBF, will be expended in the final two years of the four year projections, in 2017/18 and 2018/19. Many of the funding commitments are ongoing, into 2018/19 and beyond.

Importantly research infrastructure funded by NCRIS also received funding certainty, with
$1.5 billion promised over 10 years. ‘There will be a sigh of relief by many working in areas as diverse as the Synchrotron to the Population Health Research Network that more long term planning can now be undertaken with confidence’, said Foley.

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One reply to “$250 million for translating medical research into real benefits”

  1. As a practising GP–with a big interest in preventive and therapeutic nutrition–I have to say that I have serious misgivings about the MRFF and its spinoff, the Biomedical Translational Fund.

    I am not against giving more money to the truly innovative medical researchers [like Dr Jeff Holst, with his plan to starve tumours of key nutrients], but our national problem is that most medical researchers are well and truly followers, not innovative leaders.

    I believe we could get far bigger and better results via a publicly supported Health Research Future Fund, based on advanced preventive and therapeutic nutrition. I do hope to set this up, with some “foodie docs”, in the near future. We can offer the public such nutritional treats as the primary prevention–including during gestation–of the common mental and physical disorders seen so often in people eating the Western diet.

    These include anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, schizophrenia, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and autoimmune disorders.

    So, in time, it is likely that nutritional advances will weigh into the cost/benefit analyses done by the BTF, meaning that many new biomedical start-ups may go to the wall, due to public health nutrition already providing the answer to the disease in question.

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