This week's contributor is Dr Lesley Braun, Director Blackmores Institute.
AUSTRALIAN universities enjoy an excellent reputation for quality research and education, however they lag behind when it comes to university-industry engagement. In fact, Australia has the lowest level of industry-research collaboration in the OECD.
It's probably the reason why Chief Scientist Alan Finkel started talking about introducing a new metric to evaluate university success, which goes beyond the usual citation and grant counts -- industry engagement.
The Medical Research Future Fund released its Australian Medical Research and Innovation priorities for 2016-2018. This included utilising industry investment for the rapid funding of priority areas in health and medical research.
Preventative health research is also mentioned as a priority. Nutritional and dietary supplements, traditional medicines and systems are target rich areas for low risk treatments. Whilst those available in Australia as OTC preparations are underpinned by either traditional and/or scientific evidence, they may also have further potential to reduce disease incidence or progression.
When they work well, strategic partnerships are a powerful engine for innovation and discovery. Australia needs more of this, not less.
In the area of complementary medicine research the high level of public use and low level of government research funding makes these industry initiatives even more important.
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