Australia’s medical research faces a crisis, made worse by COVID

By Professor Jonathan Carapetis, AAMRI President

First published in The Australian, 31 July 2020

Australians have rightly celebrated people all over the country who have helped us navigate the COVID-19 pandemic so well – health care workers, police, teachers, the list goes on. Let me add another group – our medical researchers.

We had epidemiologists and disease modellers predicting the virus spread and informing the implementation of restrictions. Australian scientists worked quickly to speed up the delivery of results for COVID-19 testing, from days to now hours. And now we’re turning our attention to new drugs, therapies and ways to protect our healthcare workers.

Our approach to COVID-19 has put us in a better position than most other countries, and we can thank our primed and ready medical research workforce for ensuring that science is there to guide our decision making. We are still in a very delicate situation, but most of us feel very lucky to be in Australia.

That said, there is a group of researchers who don’t feel so lucky, and they happen to be our next generation of scientific talent. For years, Australia’s medical research institutes have been raising the alarm about the precarious position facing our earlier-career scientists. COVID-19 has exacerbated this, and puts at risk our ability to respond to future pandemics like we have to the current one.

Picture this: you are a smart scientist, just a few years out from completing your PhD and building your own career as a research leader, testing hypotheses about what causes different diseases, developing new treatments and vaccines, taking on your own PhD students. You do as our system demands, spending months of every year writing applications for funding, not just to pay for your research, but to pay your own salary. And time after time, your applications get rejected. Not because they aren’t good, not because they shouldn’t be funded, but because there are not enough grants or fellowships available from the government at this level. Each year, for example, the National Health and Medical Research Council funds only about 9 per cent of applications received from this critical cohort of early-mid career researchers.

And even if you succeed, government fellowships only cover around 60 per cent of salary costs. So you have to turn to your employer – a medical research institute or a university, in most cases – to plug the funding hole. They usually rely on philanthropy, fundraising or returns from investments and commercial revenue to fill this gap.

It is not a great solution, but we have kept this imperfect system going. Until now.

The economic downturn from COVID-19 is about to make a precarious situation for these researchers much worse. Philanthropy, investment returns and revenue from commercial deals have all fallen in recent months and are projected not to recover for several years as the true economic impact of the pandemic takes hold. Revenue from international education, a significant funder of medical research in universities, is also down. The negative impacts of these reduced revenue sources will disproportionately harm the career development of the next generation of medical research leaders. We cannot afford to allow this economic downturn to damage a sector so critical to the future health of the nation.

No wonder the morale of our best and brightest scientists has never been lower. And what message are we sending to tomorrow’s scientists – the undergraduates and high school students of today? We must act now to preserve the careers of our medical research workforce, and in so doing also reassure our future workforce that medical research is vital, rewarding and a secure career.

This budget, the medical research institute sector is calling for 300 new fellowships funded from the Australian government exclusively for our brilliant early to mid-career researchers. The alternative is to lose these 300 researchers, which would see Australia lose the equivalent of 6,000 years of past investment in their research training. A drain we cannot afford.

The funding for half of these is already there through the fully capitalised $20 billion Medical Research Future Fund. We now just need to make opportunities for early- and mid-career researchers a priority for funding, and augment the National Health and Medical Research Council funding to support the other 150.

The Health Minister, Greg Hunt, has referred to medical research’s current standing as a “golden opportunity to be a global leader in attracting new medical research, technology and clinical trials to Australia”. We agree, but we need to ensure we have the researchers of the future to deliver on this promise.

Professor Carapetis is president of the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI), a paediatrician, infectious diseases specialist and director of the Telethon Kids Institute since July 2012.


Read AAMRI’s Budget Submission and learn more about our early to mid-career scientists.