Check against delivery.
I’m delighted to be here tonight at the Melbourne Brain Centre Symposium to represent the Minister for Health Peter Dutton.
I would like to begin by acknowledging and thanking you all for the work that you do.
I speak as a local, having attended this university, some might say for a few too many years. But I must confess to a feeling of academic inferiority in this audience.
Having worked in the health and pharmaceutical sectors, and despite the hurdle of a very non-scientific Arts degree, I learned about both the quality of research and the passion of researchers right across Australia, but particularly in this part of Melbourne.
Parkville is indeed an astonishing hub of scientific and medical endeavour.
People are treated and lives saved on a daily basis thanks to the application of crucial scientific research.
We all have family experience of brain disease somewhere, cancer or dementia or in injury as we have tragically seen today. My own was an uncle who I never knew, diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1974. The treatment then consisted of pain relief and bed rest at home, until one day he simply died. My mother and grandmother still remember those terrible days when all medicine could do was watch and attempt to ameliorate the suffering on the path to death.
Because of the work you do, the boundary between what we can treat, what we can relieve or postpone and, sadly still, what we can simply watch, is constantly receding.
This is a place where new knowledge is being generated at an increasing rate by some of our country’s brightest minds; knowledge which in turn gets applied to save yet more lives and offer better treatments to patients.
Parkville is of course home to the Melbourne Brain Centre, which is producing world leading research that will make a real difference to untold numbers of Australians and their families now and in years in the future.
The Melbourne Brain Centre boasts scientific talent from some of Australia’s most impressive research institutions including the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health and the Melbourne Neuroscience Institute at the University of Melbourne.
Importantly, its home at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and affiliation with Austin Health ensures that researchers have avenues for translating their research into practice.
The scope of the Melbourne Brain Centre is broad, encompassing research into neurodegenerative disorders such as dementia and Parkinson’s disease, to other conditions including stroke, epilepsy, and brain tumours.
Despite the enormous advances that science and medicine has made over recent decades to better understand the human brain—what it is, and how it works—it remains a wonderfully complex and intricate organ.
To those outside the profession, it still has a real sense of mystery. And a sense that our ability to treat its illnesses remains our great challenge.
It is by no means due to a lack of trying that we still understand so little about the brain and disorders for the brain.
This gap in our knowledge, however, makes the work of the MBC and by many other researchers around Australia all the more important.
Diseases and disorders of the brain can progress rapidly, be unpredictable and have a devastating impact.
While brain cancer, for example, accounts for about 1.5% of all new cancer diagnoses, it is the leading cause of cancer death among young people.
In children under the age of ten, it accounts for more than one third of cancer deaths and kills more children than any other disease.
Survival rates for brain cancer have also remained fairly static over the past thirty years at around 20%.
Dementia brings similarly difficult challenges.
The scale of its current prevalence in Australia, and the predictions of its future toll, is a cause for concern at both a family and national level.
How we treat our relatives as we thankfully live longer, but also how we address this increased healthcare burden,are two challenges across the research and public policy divide.
There are now more than 320,000 Australians living with dementia—including one in four over the age of 85—and that number continues to increase steadily.
By 2050, it is estimated that nearly one million Australians will have dementia, and that 7,500 Australians will be diagnosed with dementia each week.
In short, dementia has the capacity to overwhelm our health and aged care systems.
This is why the Coalition Government announced in the 2014/15 Budget that we are investing $200 million dollars now in dementia research.
And we are already delivering on this commitment, which is in addition to existing levels of funding for dementia research.
- $95 million of this will go towards large scale research projects in priority areas of dementia research.
- $46 million will go towards supporting existing Australian dementia researchers as well as attracting scientists from other fields such as neurobiology, immunology, chemistry, bioengineering to join in the fight.
- $9 million has gone to the Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research based at the University of Queensland.
- And $50 million has been allocated to establish a new NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research, which will work to strategically expand dementia research in Australia, ensure international research efforts can be well integrated with domestic research, and create a focus for the rapid translation of evidence into policy and practice.
We hope this funding boost will bring us closer to discovering the medical interventions that are needed to halt the onset and development of dementia and maybe even bring it back the other way.
The NHMRC is already in the process of assessing applications for $32.5 million of this boost, under their Dementia Research Team Grants, and outcomes are expected to be announced around March next year.
The NHMRC also recently sought expressions of interest from organisations to establish the NHMRC National Institute for Dementia Research, and I understand that the outcome of the EOI will also be announced next year.
The Australian Government is proud to support the great work that happens in Parkville, in terms of both research and in ensuring that we can all enjoy a world-class healthcare system.
Victoria is consistently one of the highest performing states in Australia when it comes to competing for grants funded by the Australian Government through the National Health and Medical Research Council.
In the most recent announcement in October by the Prime Minister and the Minister for Health, Victorian researchers were awarded 1,813 grants totalling nearly $204.7 million – with a substantial portion of that going to researchers right here within Parkville.
A $2.5 million NHMRC grant is currently supporting some of the stellar researchers at the Melbourne Brain Centre to do critical work in research translation.
The grant is in support of a Centre for Research Excellence in Translational Neuroscience, which is headed by Professor Stephen Davis.
As the Divisional Director of Neuroscience and Director of Neurology at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Professor Davis has a professional background that lends itself superbly to research translation.
Among the CRE’s greatest achievements are over 30 new investigator-led clinical trials in areas such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.
While Australia has some of the finest researchers in the world, there is also much to be gained through international collaboration.
I congratulate the researchers at the Centre for Research Excellence in Translational Neuroscience who have established numerous international collaborations, including with Chinese researchers, and conducted regular teaching programs and research exchanges.
I understand that for their next proposed Centre for Research Excellence, the Melbourne Brain Centre will be focusing on harnessing new technologies to develop targeted, personalised therapies for people with brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis.
The theme of this research is, of course, Precision Neuroscience, which is the focus of this symposium.
The Australian Government believes in the value of health and medical research and the power that it has to transform lives.
Every one of will have, at one time or another, benefited from the findings of health and medical research, so we can appreciate its primary intent.
Less talked about is the contribution of health and medical research to creating skilled jobs and generating significant export earnings through the commercialisation of medical devices and drugs.
For our investment in medical research, we clearly get a lot back—socially as well as economically.
This is why the Australian Government is committed to the establishment of the Medical Research Future Fund, so we can support more talented researchers, enable more research to be undertaken, and expand the cycle of benefits that are reaped from this investment.
But even the most worthy projects need to be funded. And we cannot borrow the billions necessary to seed this fund. It needs to be paid for.
Medical research can give us breakthrough treatments, but it can also play a role in creating a more sustainable health system.
By translating knowledge into practice, there is obvious potential for significant gains in the health and wellbeing of all Australians, and for significant savings in the health system.
Thank you again for the opportunity to be here tonight.
More importantly, thank you for the work you do to improve the lives of our fellow Australians, and, by extension, the lives of many people around the world.
(Ends)