Money from National Reconstruction Fund will boost manufacturing capability and research commercialisation
Australia’s National Reconstruction Fund will pour A$1.5 billion into medical manufacturing in a bid to leverage the country’s “world-leading” research.
In a joint statement on 15 April, health minister Mark Butler and science minister Ed Husic said that while “health and medical research in Australia is an outperforming sector”, not enough of that knowledge is resulting in medical manufacturing.
The pair announced a Medical Science Co-Investment Plan, fulfilling earlier commitments on National Reconstruction Fund spending.
The money will go to projects that increase manufacturing capability, commercialise research and “improve international competitiveness”. Funding will focus on areas where Australia is perceived to have an advantage, such as digital health, medical devices, complex therapeutics and new technologies that increase the sustainability of the healthcare industry.
Bridging the valley of death
“Medical science investments can be high risk due to lengthy development times, high costs and commercialisation challenges,” the plan says. Research translation’s “valley of death”, where high levels of risk stymie commercial development, will be addressed by the fund, with private capital for such development lacking in Australia.
Despite schemes such as the Industry Growth Program, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Cooperative Research Centres and several Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation programmes, the biotech sector is still reporting difficulty in developing products, the plan says.
“Additional investments may assist in de-risking the environment, increasing attractiveness for private industry to license or buy university intellectual property and take it through to commercial success.”
Husic said that a cervical cancer vaccine that was developed in Australia but manufactured by the US company Merck was “a prime example of the terrible cost of lost opportunity—brilliant Australian medical research ended up being manufactured overseas because we didn’t have the capabilities to make it here”.
The plan is the first of seven that will come from the A$15bn National Reconstruction Fund. The others will focus on: value adding to resources; agriculture, forestry and fisheries; transport; renewables and low-emission technologies; defence; and “enabling capabilities”.