The Australian’s Australian of the Year: Global reach of ICU professor Steve Webb has saved untold lives

Steve Webb has co-ordinated ­efforts to uncover some of the best intensive care treatments for COVID-19, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Steve Webb. Picture: Sean Middleton

As the “conductor” of a medical research “orchestra”, Steve Webb has co-ordinated ­efforts from around the world to uncover some of the best intensive care treatments for COVID-19, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives.

Professor Webb, an intensive care doctor from Royal Perth Hospital, a researcher with Monash University in Melbourne and the clinical trial director at St John of God Healthcare in Subiaco, has been nominated for The Australian’s Australian of the Year after he created a global consortium that in the past 12 months has discovered treatments for­ ­seriously ill coronavirus patients.

Professor Webb’s leadership of the consortium, Remap-Cap, stemmed from his concern about viral pneumonia in intensive care patients at the time of the 2009 swine flu. He wanted to set up a platform to enable real-time research in the next pandemic, and his foresight has resulted in extraordinarily fast research that has led the way for global treatments of ICU coronavirus patients.

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Professor Webb’s original consortium of professor Derek Angus from the University of Pittsburgh, Roger Lewis, an emergency doctor and statistician from Los Angeles, and Scott Berry, a senior US-based statistician, has grown to include nearly 100 international investigators as the original research quickly pivoted 12 months ago to looking at treatments of thousands of seriously ill coronavirus patients in intensive care around the world.

This international team, under Professor Webb’s chairmanship, has discovered that using two ­existing arthritis treatments can save one in 12 seriously ill patients, which has been hailed as a significant and groundbreaking result. Their research has also provided evidence to guide practice in the use of convalescent plasma and blood thinning drugs for ICU patients, as it appears these treatments may cause more harm than good in the seriously ill.

Professor Webb, 56, has worked much of his life in Perth, but studied for his doctorate at Imperial College in London.

“Remap-cap is a massive team effort to execute a plan to generate evidence during a pandemic to improve the outcome for ­patients,” he said.

One of the Professor Webb’s team members, Colin McArthur from New Zealand, said: “Professor Webb has been the conductor of this (medical research) orchestra, bringing together many other players to help co-ordinate and deliver the research … it is his leadership and vigour that has corralled us.

We encourage our readers to put in a nomination for The Australian’s Australian of the Year, which was first won in 1971 by economist HC “Nugget” Coombs. Prominent Australians can be nominated by filling out the coupon above, or sending an email to [e-mail]. Nominations close on Thursday, January 21.