Science Blog

Flu research in Australia - Funding overhaul needed

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky - Flinders Medical Centre and Flinders University School of Medicine
14 August 2007

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky is at Flinders Medical Centre / Flinders University School of Medicine in South Australia where he leads a research group responsible for developing new and improved vaccines against a range of deadly infections including flu. Their research is largely funded by the National Institute of Health in the US.

Even with the recent highly publicised infant deaths from seasonal influenza in Australia and the two additional recent deaths from avian influenza in Indonesia, what we are seeing is just the typical picture of a comparatively well behaved flu virus. The real threat that continues to hang over our heads and will not go away is that of a true, much more aggressive flu outbreak. It is not a question of if this will happen but when. Which is all the more reason why every effort needs to be taken now when we still have time on our side to come up with better vaccines. This could make the difference between life and death for large segments of the population when a true flu pandemic hits.

In this scenario it is surprising to see Australia's dominant medical research funding body, the National Health and Medical Research Council, seemingly reluctant to fund influenza research projects, whilst spending hundreds of millions of dollars on scientific projects with little obvious direct relevance to human health. Hence, successful influenza projects funded under the ministerially-decreed NHMRC urgent flu grant in November 2005 at the height of the avian influenza scare were left completely without any follow up funding for this year and next year are being forced to compete for funding against basic science projects.

Given the predominance of people with scientific rather than clinical backgrounds on all the NHMRC review panels, it is not surprising that a large proportion of NHMRC funds are diverted into basic science projects and very little into projects with direct and obvious relevance to immediate improvements in human health. Hence it is likely that many of the most promising influenza research projects put up to the NHMRC will be rejected for funding by these scientific panels for reasons such as 'too clinical', insufficiently scientific, or 'too developmental and product orientated' and this critical influenza research will be effectively left out in the cold. It is widely accepted in Australian scientific circles that the ulcer research for which Marshal and Warren got the Nobel prize would have been rejected for funding by the NHMRC funding, should these two researchers had been brazen enough to ask for it!

So instead what we get from the NHMRC is all too often interesting science that from time to time might achieve a paper in Nature or Science but almost always is of minimal clinical significance, while the cutting edge potential Nobel prize winning research is dismissed by learned NHMRC review panels as being of little merit and insufficiently scientific to warrant funding!

Hence the important question that must be asked is why the funding of critical health related research in Australia such as how to reduce the catastrophic impact of the flu pandemic we inevitably face in coming years, should be left in the hands of panels of scientists who clearly value Nature and Science papers more than the potential to save millions of lives through funding much more mundane research projects such testing of hand washing to prevent spread of infections or development of improved flu vaccines.

Hence without a complete overhaul of the NHMRC and the manner in which it funds research in Australia, it is unlikely that Australian researchers will be in a leading position to help in the event of an influenza crisis. Fortunately other bodies including the US National Institute of Health have their feet firmly planted on the ground and have rapidly committed billions of dollars to research to try and address the influenza issue, even though this has meant temporarily spending less on more basic research.

Footnote: See also Nikolai's quote on flu vaccination

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