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<\/p>\nBetween broken sleep and midnight feeds for her newborn twins, Rehan Villani did not give up on her potentially life-saving cancer research.<\/p>\n
Dr Villani was trying to conduct research into how skin cancer develops and needed funding to conduct experiments in the lab.<\/p>\n
Her maternity leave was spent writing grant applications to try to keep her research alive. But it was not enough.<\/p>\n
“My childcare costs became more than the amount I was getting paid, so I couldn’t afford to go to work,” she said.<\/p>\n
Despite her passion and the progress she was making, she left medical research due to her inability to secure adequate funding.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t even that I wanted to leave or because of the pressure, it was just that it was completely non-feasible to carry on,” she said.<\/p>\n
Dr Villani is not the only researcher who has stepped away from the field for this reason.<\/p>\n
According to the Australian Health and Medical Research Workforce Audit, more than 60 per cent of researchers have left active research roles between 2019 and 2024.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, over $1 billion of medical research funding remains undistributed due to a government spending cap.<\/p>\n
The Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) was established in 2015, pledging to disburse $1 billion a year for medical research once it reached maturity at $20 billion.<\/p>\n
It reached $20 billion in 2020, but the billion-dollar-a-year pledge has never been paid out.<\/p>\n
In 2022, the Morrison government introduced a spending cap, which restricted disbursement to $650 million a year until 2032-33.<\/p>\n
The fund has now grown to over $25 billion \u2014 outperforming the original benchmark.<\/p>\n
Since 2022, the amount spent on research has been nearly $1 billion less than originally pledged.<\/p>\n
The legislation says the cap helps the fund grow more sustainably by having a fixed amount and “isolates the determination of disbursements from financial market fluctuations”.<\/p>\n
But researchers argue it is depriving a starving sector of a much-needed lifeline.<\/p>\n
Medical research ‘at a crossroads’<\/p>\n
Grant Ramm, chief scientist and interim director of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research (QIMR), described the current funding environment as one of the toughest he has seen.<\/p>\n
“I think medical research has reached a crossroads in this country,” Professor Ramm said.<\/p>\n
“Right now, Australia’s medical research sector is being asked to deliver world-class breakthroughs with funding that simply isn’t keeping pace.”<\/p>\n
Grant Ramm says the amount of funding is not keeping pace with the amount required to deliver breakthroughs in medical research. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
Researchers’ calls have been backed by the Group of Eight universities, the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI), and the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences.<\/p>\n
Research Australia, the national peak body representing the medical research sector, says they have long been advocating for the funds to be released.<\/p>\n
“This chronic underfunding directly undermines workforce stability, drives talented researchers out of the system, and constrains Australia’s current and future research capacity,” chief executive Nadia Levin said.<\/p>\n
Dwindling grant funding<\/p>\n
Last year, the National Health and Medical Research Council rejected 91.9 per cent of applications for the ideas grants scheme, despite nearly half being considered “outstanding”.<\/p>\n
Of the 2,347 applicants, only 190 projects were approved.<\/p>\n
Professor Ramm said even though researchers knew they had very little chance of success, many had no choice but to spend a disproportionate amount of time applying for grants.<\/p>\n
“That’s time taken away from patients, laboratories, and from discovering new therapies,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a pretty tough gig \u2026 going to work each day and knowing that you’ve only got a very small chance of being able to continue the work that you know is going to change lives.”<\/p>\n
Nearly four years later, Dr Villani has returned to research, but has stepped away from her work in skin cancer.<\/p>\n
She said the decision to leave was not due to having children but because she was not able to secure grant funding and therefore keep her ongoing employment.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Dr Rehan Villani has returned to the research field but has stepped away from her work in skin cancer. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
Her research focus has now shifted to inherited diseases at QIMR, but she believes she is lucky to still be in the research field at all.<\/p>\n
“Any years out of the field is near crippling in terms of your fundability,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I feel like the expertise that I have and [that] a lot of the people that I have trained alongside have \u2026 that expertise is gone.”<\/p>\n
Hamish McWilliam, an immunology researcher, also made the decision to step away from his research field and move into the private sector due to funding cut-offs.<\/p>\n
“In the end, the opportunities just aren’t there,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I felt like I couldn’t really keep doing the basic research that even I thought was really important \u2026 it just wasn’t essentially fundable in that climate.”<\/p>\n
Pressure on government to release funding<\/p>\n
Independent MP Monique Ryan has called for the federal government to release the full funding ahead of the May federal budget, saying the sector cannot afford to wait.<\/p>\n
Parliamentary Budget Office costings commissioned by Dr Ryan found the fund could more than double the disbursement to $1.4 billion per year, with no effect on the current base level of the fund, over the next decade.<\/p>\n
Health Minister Mark Butler’s office did not answer questions about removing the cap or the MRFF’s allocations in the next budget.<\/p>\n
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Mark Butler’s office did not answer questions about removing the cap on medical research funding each year. (ABC News: Callum Flinn)<\/p>\n
A Department of Health, Disability and Ageing spokesperson said while the board recommends the maximum amount of funding available each year, the decision is made by the government.<\/p>\n
The board has determined that $1.1 billion should be allocated for the 2026-27 budget. However, this exceeds the cap by $450 million.<\/p>\n