Leading scientists cautious about $20bn medical research future fund

The budget centrepiece – a $20bn “medical research future fund” – won’t improve the nation’s health unless the government broadens its brief beyond finding cures for diseases, leading health researchers and academics have warned Tony Abbott.

The prime minister has described the fund as a “fine piece of policy” that would “double our nation’s investment in finding cures for disease and better medical treatments so we can all live healthier and happier lives”.

But acclaimed medical researchers, cited by the government as examples of the people it wants to encourage with the money, said it needed to be rethought.

Many have said they are torn by a budget that provides the new pot of money, in part by charging people to visit the doctor, but also cuts $80m from co-operative research centres, $111m from the CSIRO and $75m from the Australian Research Council.

The researchers’ first priority has been to flesh out the very sketchy details provided on budget night about how the new fund would work, and provide the government with strong advice about its operation.

Professor Ian Frazer, whose team developed a world-first vaccine for cervical cancer and who appeared alongside Abbott on Monday, told Guardian Australia he and other researchers had advised Abbott and the health minister, Peter Dutton, that the fund should have a “very broad remit” beyond researching new cures. They said it should include health economics and preventive and “translational” health – “translating” medical research into diagnostic tools, medicines, procedures, policies and education.

“We get the strong sense they are planning this as they go along and I think they listened to us,” Prof Frazer said after the Brisbane meeting between the heads of research institutions, vice chancellors, leading researchers and the prime minister and health minister.

Health sector experts who attended last Tuesday’s budget lock-up were told the fund would “very strictly focus only on medical research”.

But the researchers at the Monday meeting insisted the government use the fund to implement a review of health and medical research, chaired by Simon McKeon, carried out under the former Labor government. McKeon told Guardian Australia his findings were that such a fund “has to have a broad scope if its purpose is to improve health outcomes”.

“It cannot just be restricted to medical research, it has be much broader than that,” he said.

McKeon, who is also the chairman of CSIRO, said the budget’s decisions “run in contradictory directions”.

He said the success of the new fund would depend on how it was set up. “If it is set up well [the budget] might end up delivering us a net gain, if it isn’t, we might not end up ahead. And we don’t know how it will operate yet.”

The chief scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, said he “could not see a strategy at the moment” in a budget that cut most research funding, but invested much more in medical research.

“They seem to be disconnecting medical research from all the rest, but different kinds of research are linked. To do good medical research you need good chemistry and good physics and good biology and good genetics … it doesn’t make sense to separate one thing out.”

Abbott and Dutton were again spruiking the new fund on Monday, but few leading scientists entirely agree with the strategy.

Sir Gustav Nossal, emeritus professor at the university of Melbourne, told the ABC: “I think this $20bn fund is very exciting but ... why cut CSIRO? Why cut the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation? Above all, why cut the Australian Research Council?

“This is going to make an us-and-them situation: the medical researchers will be laughing and the enabling scientists in maths, chemistry, physics and so forth will be suffering. This is not good.’’

And eminent medical researcher Professor Fiona Stanley told the Australian she was conflicted because the new fund would be established from $5 of the new $7 co-payment charged on visits to the doctor.

“What I take issue with is that, by introducing a co-payment, it will affect those who are the sickest, most marginalised, the poorest … and for that to pay for a medical research budget seems to me unpalatable,” she said.

She said deterring people from visiting their GP would lead to less early ­diagnosis and treatment for people with chronic disease.

The prime minister said he anticipated disbursements from the fund would be overseen by the National Health and Medical Research Council which “has a strong reputation as a guardian of good research. It's researchers by and large doing the right thing by researchers.”

Prof Frazer said the prime minister and the researchers had discussed another independent body being involved in making grants decisions in the future.