A covid era cap on MRFF distribution is killing careers and making a joke of our ‘smart country’ ambitions.
As independent MP Dr Monique Ryan ramped up her campaign to get the federal government to release more research dollars from the MRFF, another top researcher has voiced his concerns for the future of middle-career researchers in Australia.
On Friday Dr Ryan launched her Medical Research Matters campaign saying it was “utterly wasteful that so many of our brightest young people are spending three months a year writing grant applications with a less than 10% chance of success”.
“When they look elsewhere for a career, it costs us all.
“And it’s hugely frustrating that the money is sitting in the bank, ready to be spent, while the government looks the other way,” she said.
“If you value something, you pay for it. We can’t call ourselves a ‘clever country’ if we fail to value and support medicine and science properly.”
The Medical Research Future Fund was set up in 2015 as a $20 billion endowment fund intended to generate $1 billion annually for health and medical research.
But during the height of the covid pandemic, the federal government – then led by Scott Morrison – was concerned about diminished returns and decided to cap the amount to be distributed.
Neither the Morrison government nor the subsequent Albanese Labor government has removed that cap since, with the result that despite the MRFF now standing at $24 billion, only about $650 million per year is being distributed to researchers.
Professor Andrew Coats, AO, CEO and scientific director of the Heart Research Institute, said the underspending from the MRFF was having a devastating impact on the careers of Australian researchers.
And it wasn’t the youngest researchers being the most affected, he said.
“It’s the people who’ve perhaps already had 10 years in research, but they’ve reached their second or third postdoc period,” Professor Coats told The Medical Republic.
“That is when they have to become an independent investigator and raise their own grants. And by their very nature, they’re not the absolutely top-rated application, because they haven’t been doing it for 20 or 30 years.
“[The money] goes to the senior professors.
“So, that’s the valley of death – not your first postdoc, where you’re supported by your department, maybe not even the second one, when you go to another department that are friends with your supervisor.
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“It’s the third and fourth period, when you just have to stand totally on your own two feet that is really hard.”
Just before Christmas, the sector was squeezed even further after nine out of 10 Ideas grant applications were rejected by the National Health and Medical Research Council, including half of those deemed “outstanding”.
“When the success rate’s under 10%, it’s a complete lottery,” said Professor Coats.
“You waste all that time applying for the grant – three months out of every year, and it may take another 12 months to get a decision – and you get nothing.
“They can’t keep their career going, and their employers sometimes can’t afford them if they can’t bring research grants more quickly.
“With success rates of less than one in 10 on average, an averagely good researcher will have to wait 10 to 11 years, and no one can afford to support someone without their own independent research grants for 10 years.”
It’s not just the throttling back of the MRFF money flow causing problems for the research sector, said Professor Coats.
“Our investment in research and development as a nation is well below what we should be doing based on OECD averages,” he said.
“The government policy over years, decades, has been to underinvest in R&D.
“We want to be a smart country and a smart economy, but we’re simply not investing for that. That’s an issue of political will to change the status quo.”
And there are downstream consequences for patients as well as the medical sector itself, he said.
“Medical research is instrumental for what an advanced company needs to do, because you improve the local healthcare. And the effects are immediate – patients who participate in clinical trials get better care, the hospitals recruit a greater number of junior doctors, students, nurses, senior nurses. So you raise the game for the whole hospital.
“If you do less research, then you’re a follower. You then have to input new advances – you get them late and you end up paying a lot more money for them because they’re not developed locally.
“The country makes a lot of money out of clinical trial investment, pharmaceutical investment, so everyone benefits.
“And of course, our major technology successes in the medical area – ResMed, Cochlear, Gardasil – they have all depended on locally grown research.
“We simply won’t get those blockbuster industries if we don’t invest.”
