Sienna Cancer Diagnostics and Benitec attack proposed use of government’s $20 billion medical research fund

EXCLUSIVE: The Health Minister angers researchers by ruling out using the $20 billion medical research fund to commercialise Australian breakthroughs.

BIG international drug companies, not the Australian economy, will reap the profits from the $20 billion medical research fund financed by the new fee on GP visits, experts warn.

The research fund established in the May budget will be financed by savings from $10 billion in health cutbacks including the controversial $7 GP fee and the $5 increase in prescription medicine charges.

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Health Minister Peter Dutton has raised the ire of researchers by ruling out using money from the $20 billion medical research fund to commercialise Australian medical breakthroughs.

“The government with taxpayers money is not a hedge fund, we’re not an entrepreneur with a huge appetite for high risk, high return,” Mr Dutton said when asked by News Corp Australia if money from the fund would be used to help turn research into pills or treatments.

“We’re the guardians of the taxpayer’s money we need to spend it in a responsible way,” Mr Dutton said.

“We need to spend the taxpayers’ money in a responsible way” ... Federal Minister for Health Peter Dutton.

The comments are a blow for local drug manufacturers and researchers who lament that this means Australian medical breakthroughs like the cervical cancer vaccine will developed by big international drug companies with little of the profit being kept here.

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Australian drug company Benitec has just started clinical trials of a breakthrough one jab treatment for hepatitis C that turns off the gene that causes the disease suffered by 170 million people worldwide.

The gene treatment is based on research by the CSIRO and could also be used to treat other diseases such as lung cancer and macular degeneration.

Benitec chief Dr Peter French came to Canberra seeking government support to see the research translated into a treatment but was given none.

“We talked to the Chinese Government and they were talking wages subsidies, subsidies for land and construction and housing for staff, they can see this as very exciting,” he said.

“If the government won’t spend money from the $20 billion medical research fund on

translating research into commercial products it will get a whole lot of nice papers but it won’t benefit the economy,” Dr French told News Corp Australia.

Sienna Cancer Diagnostics has just launched a new urine test for bladder cancer based on Australian research that is being developed by US pathology companies.

The test eliminates the need for a painful scope being inserted into the patient’s waterworks to diagnose the cancer and slashes the cost of diagnosis from $2,000 to $150.

The new test was bought to the commercialisation phase with the help of an $800,000 government grant from Commercialisation Australia that funded clinical tests, manufacturing and negotiations with pathology laboratories.

That program was abolished in the May budget.

Major work needs financial support ... Dr Fiona Bruinsma of the Cancer Council is researching into uncommon cancers people get and to raise more awareness about them.

Sienna chief Kerry Heggarty says she feels passionately about keeping the profits from this breakthrough and any others in Australia.

“Some of the $20 billion should be spent on commercialisation otherwise we’re not keeping the money in Australia and it will go to US or European companies,” she says.

“Let’s say the $20 billion fund generates a super idea that is translated to a patent and some big US company says I’ll turn it into a product- they get 90 per cent of the profit, we get 10 per cent,” she said.

The Department of Health revealed in Senate Estimates the Medical Research Fund was a last-minute addition to the budget with policy work beginning in April, just weeks before the budget was delivered.

Opposition health spokeswoman Catherine King says this is proof that the fund had

“merely been established to distract from the $80 billion cuts to hospitals and schools and new taxes on doctor visits and medicines”.

Originally published as Sienna Cancer Diagnostics and Benitec attack proposed use of government’s $20 billion medical research fund