AusBiotech welcomes McKeon Review focus on translation

The Strategic Review of Health and Medical Research in Australia, also known as the “McKean Review” was established by the Australian Government in late 2011 to recommend a 10-year strategic health and medical research plan for the nation by the end of 2012.

It recently released a report, providing a consultation paper for comment until the end of October.

The consultation paper noted seven strategic themes to achieve its vision and called for an additional $2-3 billion per year over the next ten years to be invested in research to deliver a better health system, with an additional $0.4-0.6 billion per annum for other initiatives.

AusBiotech welcomes the consultation paper’s themes in regard to the translation of research outcomes into benefits for the community.

Amongst the recommendations are themes to enhance commercial and non-commercial “pathways to impact”, which included:

• Support Research Commercialisation. Maintain health and medical research access to Australian Research Council (ARC) linkage grants, replace NHMRC Development Grants with a new Matching Development Block Grant Scheme, and establish a new early-stage development fund (possibly around $250 million in scale).
• Enhance Commercialisation Environment. Improve commercialisation visibility, facilitate exchange between research and industry and improve access to scale commercialisation services.
• Enhance Health System Research. Build capacity in health services research and health economics, to understand and assist translation, and to evaluate health system innovation.
• Accelerate Health System Innovation. Accelerate research translation and health system innovation through key performance indicators (KPIs) and recognition of translation as a valuable form of research output, and develop a clinical registry program and translation plans.

When it comes to fundamental discovery in science and biomedical research, Australia is a legitimate and impressive global contributor, producing 3% of the world’s research publications with only 0.3% of the population.

However, our ability to translate this strength into tests, cures, treatments and vaccines to benefit the Australian community falls short of expectation.

The 2012 (INSEAD) Global Innovation Index ranks Australia 13th in terms of innovation input and 31st in innovation output. But when these figures are converted to innovation efficiency ratio of output over input, Australia dives to a ranking of 107 out of 141 countries assessed.

The Federal Government spends more than $9 billion annually on research, with about 98.5% provided to the research end of the spectrum, leaving only about 1.5 per cent of that spent on commercialisation: translating the research into products. Approximately 50% of this is directed to the automotive industry, which leaves little for other areas of Australian ingenuity.

The full consultation paper can be found at the McKeon Review website.