Letter from... Australia

Janine Mace reports on the efforts being made in Australia to establish a stronger and more profitable biopharmaceutical industry

It is amazing what you can do once you have helped discover a vaccine for cervical cancer and are tipped as a possible recipient of a Nobel Prize.

These days when Professor Ian Frazer speaks, governments listen. And they are happy to put money into projects that otherwise would have had to battle it out to win a slice of the funding necessary to get them off the ground.

So when Frazer, 2006 Australian of the Year, started talking about raising A$300m to build an advanced medical research facility based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, governments were quick to reach for their chequebooks.

The Queensland Government has promised A$100m and the Federal Government’s 2007 Budget in May stumped up another A$100m, ensuring that the proposed Translational Research Institute (TRI) at the Princess Alexandra Hospital is a certainty to get off the ground.

Frazer’s brainchild will create a flagship medical research facility designed to provide a one-stop shop for medical research and state-of-the-art facilities for clinical trials and early-stage drug manufacture.

According to the University of Queensland’s vice chancellor, Professor John Hay, it will help make Australia a ‘powerhouse of biopharmaceutical development in south-east Asia’.

‘This institute will be an Australian first and only one of a handful in the world,’ he said after the Federal Budget funding was announced.

The TRI is expected to house around 500 scientists working on translating scientific discoveries into drugs in areas including cancer, infection, diabetes and inflammatory disease.

Frazer believes the establishment of this type of facility will help overcome a major problem he encountered during his work to develop a vaccine for cervical cancer, and is a vital step in establishing a stronger and more profitable Australian biopharmaceutical industry.

Although Australia has a distinguished history of medical research and pharmaceutical innovation, it currently lacks the facilities to take these discoveries from the laboratory to the pharmacy shelf, losing much of the financial gain to the major multinational drug companies.

As Frazer said in a recent interview on ABC Television: ‘We’re a small country but we contribute well above our weight in terms of the basic science… but there’s a gap in our industry here at the moment… and that is we can’t actually make the products here for testing clinically.’

He estimates that if he had been able to move to the next stage after his initial research breakthrough with the cervical cancer vaccine, Australia would have received an additional A$250m–A$300m annually.

The lack of appropriate facilities meant that, after the initial research work, it was necessary to license the vaccine to the international pharmaceutical giant Merck, which will gain most of the profits.

While Australia receives a return from the intellectual property developed here, this return is small in comparison with the 30% of sales it would have received if clinical trials could have been undertaken locally to show that the vaccine was effective in small groups.

Professor Frazer estimates Australia is missing out on up to A$300m annually from the global sales of what is now being marketed as the Gardasil vaccine.

The World Health Organisation has announced that the drug should become part of the suite of vaccines distributed throughout the Third World. Over the next four years Australia is rolling out a free national vaccination programme with the drug for all females aged between 12 and 26.

Although Australia’s small biopharmaceutical industry missed out on much of the bonanza from the cervical cancer discovery, Frazer believes that establishing a TRI facility will be a major step forward in growing Australia’s biopharmaceutical capacity and will help avoid a recurrence of the same situation.

‘Building this Australian facility for small and medium scale production, and testing of biopharmaceuticals to the highest international standards, will make our growing biopharmaceuticals industry world-competitive,’ he said.

‘It will also bring significant social and economic benefit to Australia. Co-locating the production facility with state-of-the-art basic and clinical research facilities and a world-class hospital will accelerate the development of exciting new therapeutics.’

Maybe next time it will not be just accolades that flow back to Australia’s research community.

Janine Mace is an Australian freelance finance and business journalist.