The folly of politicising medical research funding

The folly of politicising medical research funding  

A series of leaks over the past month indicate that the Australian Government may cut as much as $400 million over 3 years from its $800 million annual investment in medical research through the National Health and Medical Research Council.  

Such a decision would be short-sighted in the extreme.  

In order to achieve immediate political objectives, the Gillard Government is indicating a potential willingness to make decisions that will result in increases in future health costs by retarding progress towards better treatments and care for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and dementia. This, in turn, could result in additional years of disabling chronic disease, and some preventable future deaths.  

Australian medical researchers, who have always punched well above their weight on the global stage, are making important new discoveries in areas such as neuroimaging, stem-cell therapies, neurogenesis and biomarkers. With further research, these developments should lead directly to new therapies.  

However, if funding is cut, even temporarily, then much of this research will falter. The benefits of decades of investment in long-term medical studies will not be realised, and progress towards preventing or delaying the onset of some of the most disabling and costly medical conditions will be retarded.  

A large part of my own work in the fields of psychiatry and ageing over the past 30 years has been directed at better understanding and managing dementia, a common, chronic, costly and disabling syndrome.  

With a slow but steady increase in government funding over the past decade and an increasing number of Australia’s best young scientists being attracted into the field, we are now beginning to make significant strides in knowledge that will one day result in treatments and interventions that should prevent or delay many cases of dementia.  

If we do not develop such treatments, the inevitable ageing of our population will result in dementia becoming the biggest cost to our health and care system in both economic and social terms. The number of Australians living with dementia will grow from 269,000 today to around one million by mid-century. Over the same period of time, the number of people involved in caring for people with dementia now will quadruple to four million ( i.e. 1 in 8 Australians!) in 2050.  

As Ita Buttrose, the new President of Alzheimer’s Australia reminded us recently, the dementia epidemic indicated by these projections can be avoided. But this will only happen with increased funding for dementia research from Government and additional support from business and the community.  

In contrast, the rumoured budget cuts would result in a reduction in funding available through the NHMRC of around 20% per year. This, in turn, will lead to the ‘success rate’ of the thousands of high quality funding applications submitted to the agency by Australia’s medical scientists dropping from a low 23% to a paltry 15%.  

These cuts will be felt most keenly by junior medical researchers – the best and brightest young minds fresh from a decade or more of university study – who will find their dreams of contributing to future medical treatments thwarted by lack of opportunity. Unable to secure research funding to pursue their work, many of these young researchers will be forced to look elsewhere. Some will go overseas – accelerating the ‘brain drain’ that has plagued Australia for years – while others will be lost to research altogether and when my cohort of scientists retires, Australia will be left with a stunted and depleted medical research community that, for political purposes during a single political cycle, was cut off at the knees.  

Ten months ago, attending a symposium on ageing organised by Imperial College, London, I asked the distinguished Australian Immunologist, Professor Marc Feldmann, why he had never come home to work in Australia. His answer was that whenever he looked at doing so, the funding prospects in Australia seemed so much worse than those in Britain and Europe. The next Monday he was knighted by a grateful British Government. If bankrupt Britain remains more attractive for our medical researchers than relatively wealthy Australia, it will be impossible to maintain our position as a country that contributes to medical research in the disproportionate way that we have done in recent decades.  

Professor David Ames is Director of the National Ageing Research Institute and Chief Medical Advisor to Alzheimer’s Australia. More information on the proposed cuts, along with an online petition is available at www.discoveriesneeddollars.org.