Professor Guillaume Lessene<\/a> sees our greatest opportunity.<\/p>\n\u201cBecause we\u2019re still developing our foundations, Australia is not weighed down by legacy infrastructure or outdated models,\u201d says Prof Lessene, Associate Director of Therapeutic Discovery at WEHI.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can design a future-ready biotech ecosystem from the ground up \u2013 leaner, faster and globally competitive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Right now, less than 5% of cancer drugs entering clinical trials in Australia* originate from local drug discovery pipelines \u2013 a figure Prof Lessene believes could rise to 20-50% if the right conditions are put in place.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis could inject billions into the domestic economy and catalyse a steady stream of urgently needed medicines. And the foundations are all here, we just need robust backing.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrug discovery today is a marathon that takes years and costs billions.<\/p>\n
\u201cCombining a bold vision with artificial intelligence, machine learning and future quantum computing tools, it could be a sprint \u2013 faster, smarter and delivering life-changing medicines and diagnostics sooner.\u201d<\/p>\n
A thriving biotech sector is essential to turn more home-grown, sovereign discoveries into real impact for patients.<\/p>\n
Both national strategies reinforce that success will be measured not just in discovery, but in how quickly research is translated into patient care, health system practice and real\u2011world outcomes.<\/p>\n
Stepping up to strengthen the sector, WEHI is connecting research excellence and technology with capital, industry collaboration and pathways to scale.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia is world-class at running clinical trials but rarely the birthplace of the drugs being tested. Two major…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":713409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-713408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/713409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}