AusHealth partners with new $238 million cooperative research centre
Solutions for Manufacturing Advanced Regenerative Therapies (SMART) CRC has been announced today by The Hon Ed Husic MP Minister for Industry and Science.
AusHealth is one of the architects of the new cooperative research centre, designed to grow Australia’s biomanufacturing industry and take radical regenerative therapies out of the laboratory and into the real world.
SMART CRC is made up of 63 partners including CSL, Merck, Leica Microsystems, Queensland Government, a raft of biotech companies and eight universities.
The partners have committed to funding the CRC with $173 million over ten years; the Federal Government has contributed $65 million.
According to SMART CRC Chair Leanna Read, regenerative therapies are the future of medicine.
“We’re talking about ground-breaking treatments like CAR-T treatments that have shown to be up to 90% curative in some blood cancers,” she says.
Leanna explains Australia has a bottleneck in bringing new treatments and new products to manufacture, which means regenerative therapies remain too expensive, too scarce or stuck in the laboratory.
“So Australian patients aren’t benefiting from them.”
SMART CRC is an opportunity to grow the nation’s capacity and capabilities in biomanufacturing novel therapies and products.
“We’re being very targeted,” says Leanna. “We’re asking industry to tell us what problems we need to solve, as opposed to, ‘let’s invent a widget and see who wants it’.
“We’re also focussed on getting projects off the ground quickly. We want to get results from research, get them to industry and get products into the market.”
This acceleration will be facilitated by partners like AusHealth which is already evolving regenerative therapy projects into commercial entities.
According to AusHealth CEO Dr Justin Coombs, “From our point of view, SMART CRC increases the pool of talent and the pool of funding.
“It will turbocharge what we’re doing in a number of spaces, including translating immune therapies for cancer and developing treatments for septic shock, diabetes and metabolic disease.”
Justin says the new CRC will be transformative for Australia’s health tech industry and enhance sovereign capability.
“The fact is these new therapies are showing amazing promise – they’re a brave new world of medical treatment.
“SMART CRC will help to make that brave new world a reality.”