Illumina and Melbourne university deal sealed with Victorian funds
The Victorian Government’s higher education investment fund is rolling out joint projects to stimulate the economy post-Covid.
When the Victorian government announced $350m for university projects in its May budget, Sean Grimmond and his colleagues at University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research saw their chance to get a deal with US-based genomics company Illumina across the line.
They were already partners, with the aim of harnessing Illumina’s powerhouse genome-mapping platform to advance Melbourne’s ambition to become a world leader in genomics and cancer research.
That desire was realised last December with the announcement of the $60m Illumina-University of Melbourne Genomics Hub, the first project approved and partly financed by the Victorian government Higher Education State Investment Fund.
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“Given the strong interest and wealth of health expertise and knowledge in genomics that the university has, we were very keen to see how we could not just do good science but how could we create vehicles to look at innovation together,” Professor Grimmond said.
Apart from “accelerating our ability to improve outcomes for patients”, the plan is to train a workforce in the field and fulfil its commitment to the government.
“What we are expected to do with this is create innovative products. We definitely have an expectation here around the development of products and services and, most importantly, jobs for the state. So we want to be seeing people being employed in spin-out companies.”
The first of its two projects is to develop genomic-based technologies to more simply and effectively diagnose cancer cases that are the most challenging to treat. This will to be undertaken by the university’s cancer centre.
The second, led by the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, is to study the progression of disease in people with COVID-19 to identify best treatment for each individual.
The deal’s financing is commercial-in-confidence, so the fund’s contribution has not been revealed.
The fund is part of pandemic recovery efforts aimed at supporting capital works, research infrastructure and applied research projects that could boost the economy. Victorian Higher Education Minister Gayle Tierney said the projects announced so far were “just the start”.
The government expects to allocate all the money by the end of June next year; however, so far there are five projects that have received $46.5m in total, excluding the unknown amount given to the genomics hub.
La Trobe University received $17m for its Digital and Bio Innovation Hubs (two projects) and contributed $6m of its own.
Deakin University’s $20m manufacturing innovation hub, ManuFutures2, has been half financed by the fund; and $10m has been allocated to build a hydrogen hub at Swinburne University of Technology to research technologies including clean energy vehicles and hydrogen storage containers, creating 300 jobs.
Federation University at Ballarat has received $9.5m for a new business centre in the University Town Precinct there.
The government expects about half the funding to be distributed this financial year. While this year’s projects are co-designed with individual universities, the rest, to be allocated next financial year, will go to collaborations between universities.
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