News, Links and other Items of Interest
Cuts to NHMRC Research Funding Centre—letter from B-HERT to The Hon Nicola Roxon, Minister for Health and Ageing
Strengthening the AQF: a framwork for Australia's qualifications - Consultation Paper July 2010 (pdf)
IBSA Enterprise Innovation Summit (22 June 2009) Event Summary
Transforming Australia’s Higher Education System—The Australian Government's response to the Bradley Review (Australian Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations website)
Powering Ideas—the Australian Government's innovation policy agenda to 2020 (Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research website)
AIRG Conference final report—Picking Winners in Industrial R&D (132KB pdf) (22-24 Feb 2009)
New World: New opportunities, and new challenges, in health care
The following is an extract from a Keynote Address by Professor Ian Frazer, Director, Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine at B-HERT's sponsored talk at the Hargraves Institute International Conference ("New World. New Opportunity"), in Sydney on 10 March 2009:
If the 20th Century was the century of control of acute disease, through application of knowledge about the underlying pathophysiology to the development of disease specific interventions, the 21st Century will be the century of prevention of chronic disease, through application of knowledge about factors conveying increased risk to development of appropriate risk mitigation strategies.
Somewhat disconcertingly, we already have the knowledge to prevent much chronic disease through behavior modification, and we're not using it. At least 30% of cancer can be prevented by a few simple strategies including tobacco control, weight control, moderation of alcohol consumption and avoidance of excess sunlight, while removing known carcinogens from the environment would prevent another 20%.
Add in vaccines to prevent the 20% of cancer caused by infection, and cancer would not be the number one killer in the developed world it has become today, and would not pose the threat of becoming the number one killer in the developing world.
However, behavior modification has to be motivated, and the best hope of this will be to identify people whose genetic makeup particularly predisposes them to disease, as its easier to encourage behavior change based on a known heightened personal risk.
Personal knowledge of our genes, and how we vary one from another, has already made significant inroads into mapping those at risk of diabetes and arthritis, and over the next 50 years it is likely that the combination of rapid gene sequencing and large scale epidemiological studies across whole populations will demonstrate which of us are most prone to the common serious chronic diseases, including persistent viral infections, vascular degeneration, neurodegenerative disease, and chronic destructive inflammatory disease.
We face the twin challenges of ensuring that this knowledge is used appropriately and not to disadvantage those at risk, and to ensure the equitable availability of access to such personal information across nations, and between nations.
