Medicine And Life Science (ANU Podcasts)

2nd Annual John Curtin Lecture in  Medical Research, entitled 'Switching the immune system off: the keys to  autoimmunity, allergy, immune deficiency and cancer'

The Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute held an Information Session for prospective applicants for funding to establish Centres of Research Excellence in primary health care. Applications for this third round of Centres of Research Excellence will open in early November 2011. Up to five new Centres of Research Excellence will be awarded funding to commence research in 2013. Each Centre is expected receive a grant of around $2.5m over four years.APHCRI's Centres of Research Excellence aim to produce relevant research and enhance primary health care research capacity. They are expected to focus on the priority areas identified by the National Primary Health Care Strategy.APHCRI's Centres of Research Excellence are required to be a collaborative effort between two or more separate institutions. At least one of the collaborating institutions must not be a previous recipient of APHCRI funding.Prospective applicants are invited to attend this Information Session. The session will also be available via podcast and vodcast onhttp://www.anu.edu.au/aphcri.

Improvements in healthcare quality, safety and efficiency require the coordinated involvement and contributions of diverse stakeholder groups, including government agencies, NGOs, professional associations and communities, healthcare delivery organisations and others. Each of these groups has its own constituencies, goals and constraints, and reconciling these to achieve optimal coordination is challenging. Dr Brian Mittman will introduce key challenges encountered by the US Department of Veterans Affairs and other large reform-oriented delivery systems in the US, and will discuss strategies employed to successfully overcome selected challenges as well as barriers still to be addressed.

Professor Stephen Koslow - Translational research and personalised medicine A formula for Success for psychiatry and mentally ill patients

Professor Malcolm Horne - Plasma alpha synuclein as risk marker for Parkinson's disease

Professor Colim Masters - Biomarkers inform therapeutic strategies in neuropsychiatric disease

Professor Ian Everall - Gene expression in schizophrenia: Mechanism and biomarkers

1st National Symposium on Translational Psychiatry - Keynote Address A sneak peak at the future of psychiatry

Professor Ian Hickie - Neuropsychological and circadian predictors of illness progression in young people with mood disorders 

1st National Symposium on Translational Psychiatry Professor Philip Mitchell - A high risk longitudinal study of offspring of patients with bipolar disorder

1st National Symposium on Translational Psychiatry - Round table discussion The future of scienctific publishing: When to go to new venues, When to stick to traditioanl journals. Chaired by Julio Licinio, Professor Gin Mahli and Professor Bernhard Baune.

New research criteria for vascular cognitive disorders: Toward a VASCOG consensus

Early in tervention neuroprogression and neuroprotection: Pathways to progressive brain changes and novel therapeutic targets.

From population trials to public health practice: An example of a Global Health Service

Welcome and overview, 1st National Symposium on Translational Psychiatry

In this masterclass Professor Jonathan Lomas draws on his extensive work in the field to examine the diffusion, spread and sustainability of proven innovations in health care. Professor Lomas’ masterclass is based on the concept of an innovation adoption chain involving the three interlinked stages of production/evaluation, dissemination and final adoption of innovations. The ideas within the class are drawn from the principles of effective knowledge translation and exchange. The focus is on both individual and organisational issues in creating a more receptive context for innovation through changed structures, processes and cultures.  

In this masterclass Professor Jonathan Lomas draws on his extensive work in the field to examine the diffusion, spread and sustainability of proven innovations in health care. Professor Lomas’ masterclass is based on the concept of an innovation adoption chain involving the three interlinked stages of production/evaluation, dissemination and final adoption of innovations. The ideas within the class are drawn from the principles of effective knowledge translation and exchange. The focus is on both individual and organisational issues in creating a more receptive context for innovation through changed structures, processes and cultures.  

The Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute (APHCRI) at The Australian National University (ANU) has opened the second round of funding to establish up to seven additional Centres of Research Excellence (CREs) in Primary Health Care. This information session for prospective applicants was presented at the ANU on 21 March 2011.

Professor Ian Chubb, Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University, and the Honourable Warren Snowdon MP, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Services Delivery, launched the National Health Reform Series in Committee Room 2s1, Parliament House, Canberra on 19 November at 10.30am. The topic of the launch event was, 'Can we fix the health system without reforming the workforce?' The series is being presented by ANU and supported by the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute and the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. A series of briefings will be held between November 2009 and July 2010. This is the third event in the series entitled, Can local networks make a difference for primary health care?

Biodiversity loss, namely a reduction in the variety of life on Earth, continues relatively unabated worldwide. Biodiversity loss represents far more than a loss to experience nature's beauty or to benefit economically from nature. The simplification of the biosphere has profound and well-known consequences for human well-being. Biodiversity serves as a repository for new medicines and as a source of insights into human disease. It can provide a check up on the spread of infectious diseases and it also delivers a host of goods and services such as food, water and air purification, and regulation of climate.In this lecture, Dr Bernstein presented examples, including evidence from recent emerging infectious diseases in Southeast Asia such as SARS and Nipah virus, that biodiversity is a public health matter. He argued that human well-being is tied to the well-being of all species and that we must take care of biodiversity if we are to take care of ourselves. This lecture was presented by the Institute for Population Health, ANU College of Medicine, Biology and Environment. Dr Aaron Bernstein's speaking tour was made possible by the Thomas Foundation Conservation Oration presented in partnership with The Nature Conservancy.

Professor Ian Chubb, Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University, and the Honourable Warren Snowdon MP, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Services Delivery, launched the National Health Reform Series in Committee Room 2s1, Parliament House, Canberra on 19 November at 10.30am. The topic of the launch event was, 'Can we fix the health system without reforming the workforce?' The series is being presented by ANU and supported by the Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute and the Menzies Centre for Health Policy. A series of six briefings will be held between November 2009 and July 2010. ] This is the second event in the seres entitled, Are GP Super Clinics the answer to the access problems? 

Since President Barrack Obama took office early this year, Congress has proposed bold actions to address the ailing United States health care system. In a system that spends $2.4 trillion each year on health care with some of the worst outcomes in the western world, there is enthusiasm to revitalise primary care. Dr Andrew Bazemore, of the Robert Graham Center in Washington DC, will talk about health reform in the US and the renewed role for evidence-based policy making.

Depression is expected to be the disorder with the highest burden in western countries by 2030. Treating the disease has limited impact, but can prevention of depression help in reducing this burden? Evidence suggests it is possible to prevent the onset of depressive disorders in high-risk groups. So what is prevention and why is it important? Can depression among the population be reduced by using this technique? Professor Cuijpers will answer these questions and provide an overview of the research, including its limitations and the challenges for future research. As part of his talk, Professor Cuijpers will talk about the potential use of the internet to provide care to people with depressive disorders

Climate change raises a number of challenges to human wellbeing, among these is the threat to our health. In combination with climate change, large-scale global environmental changes such as loss of biodiversity, changes in fresh water supplies and stresses on food production systems, have the potential to cause systemic adverse alterations in patterns of health and disease. These can combine with many other specific challenges, including the emergence of new infectious diseases and the re-emergence and re-distribution of old infectious foes (such as tuberculosis and malaria). While, early on, the effects of these health changes are likely to be most severe in the developing world, they pose health threats to all of us. This lecture evaluated the impact, and significance, of these health threats and the strategies being adopted to avert and contain them.

This address introduces the ideas in Professor Greg Gibson's new book It Takes a Genome. The last two years have seen a revolution in genome scientists' ability to find the genes that influence whether a person is likely to suffer from any one of the major common chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, depression, or dementia. The shocking result, though, is that rather than a few dozen genes in each case, there are hundreds if not thousands in play, each of which contributes a small effect. These are analogous to dark matter in the Universe: they must be there, but we cannot easily see them. As well as explaining this conundrum and discussing the implications, Gibson will present the idea that chronic disease arises out of a very modern imbalance: there is a disconnect between our rapidly evolved human genome and the dramatic transitions in human lifestyles over the past few generations.

Governments, internationally and in Australia, are increasingly encouraging team-based care in frontline health systems using various incentives. Dr Campbell will provide an overview of the impact of financial incentives on the performance of primary care professionals.

Commonwealth Government needs to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of Australia's health care system. Primary health care provides the first point of contact for patients and is touted as the cornerstone of a more effective health system, but it is undermined by fragmented services. Frontline clinicians need be able to provide comprehensive, coordinated and personalised care to patients, particularly those with multiple serious illnesses such as cancer, diabetes and depression. Dr Stange looked at the challenges facing the primary care system in the United States that could inform the Australian health community as it grapples with a major reform process. The lecture was based on a series of editorials that will appear in the international journal Annals of Family Medicine, focusing particularly on understanding and organising health as a science of connectedness.

Obesity has increased dramatically across the world, and there is currently no solution to its control. While obesity is easily understood as the positive imbalance of energy intake and expenditure, this does not explain why it is easy to overeat and underexercise. Explanatory models that feed into energy balance include those of obesogenic environments, thrifty genotype, obesogenic behaviour, obesogenic culture, nutrition transition, political economic structures and biocultural interactions of genetics, environment, behaviour and culture. The last of these models has obesity as an outcome of the complex systems which constitute modern life, and in which biology, environment, sociality, economics, infrastructure, culture and behaviour interact. An attempt to understand obesity as complex system has come with an initiative of the British government, in which a qualitative systems map of obesity for the British population has been generated. In this presentation, various models of population obesity are considered in relation to the idea of obesity as complex system.

Orthodox neo-Darwinism very much emphasises the random and contingent. Re-run the tape of life, as Steven Jay Gould famously observed, and the outcomes would be utterly different. Terrestrial life maybe, but certainly no humans. They, like tulips and tape-worms, are just another evolutionary fluke. The basis of this is hardly surprising: think of random mutations, massive shifts in the environment, not to mention the odd giant rock dropping out of the sky. Life is on a roller-coaster and is flung from one strange place to another. Conway Morris argued for the exact reverse, that evolution is like any other science, that is it is predictable. The mainstay of this argument revolved around evolutionary convergence, the observation that from different starting points evolution arrives at the same solution. A classic example is the camera-eyes (and please do not mention ‘deep homology'), but less appreciated is that convergence is not common, it is ubiquitous. Evidence continues to grow that evolutionary bifurcations are far from random, but probably lead to inevitable outcomes. This suggests the Tree of Life is very different from the sprawling mass of foliage that is commonly envisaged. Also of great importance is the inherency of molecular systems and the capacity for self organisation. Darwinian evolution explains the mechanism, but not the outcomes.

Research findings and government reports indicate Australia's primary health care workforce is facing significant challenges and is lagging behind in its use of teamwork approaches. The National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission report finds that multi-disciplinary teams could help provide better primary health care services. However, getting GPs, nurses and other health care professionals to work together requires inter-professional learning. Professor Debra Humphris provided an overview of the impact of teamwork development within primary health care in the UK and its implications for the way services are delivered in Australia.

One of the few attractive ways of escaping the current economic depression is to create new companies and new industries. Scientific research provides perhaps the best starting point. Just how this can be achieved is illustrated by successful examples from Oxford University. From the Chemistry Department alone six members of staff have become millionaires without giving up their university posts or being given dispensation from duties. Professor W. Graham Richards graduated in Chemistry from Brasenose College, Oxford in 1962, and was a Fellow of Brasenose and lecturer, reader and professor at Oxford for over 40 years. For the last 10 years until his retirement in 2007 he was Head of Chemistry, the largest chemistry department in the Western World. This lecture was presented by The John Curtin School of Medical Research.

Learning how to harness the power of the immune system to combat infectious killers has been one of the most dramatic developments in the history of medicine.  Eradication of smallpox and the near elimination of polio serve to remind us that the destiny of disease can be written by human ingenuity.  These and other great feats continue to inspire us all as we strive to combat major infectious killers of the 21st Century.  Success rarely comes easily and we are enormously challenged by various viruses, bacteria and parasites that collectively cause several million deaths per year.  A common thread of the resistance to immunity and vaccine development is the uncanny ability to escape immune attack by altering coat proteins and to further subvert the immune system.  A major strategy of vaccine development is to identify a non variable region of the organism that can be an immune Achilles heel for the germ.  Another approach is to combine the most common immune determinants ('epitopes') of different strains of a particular organism into a single vaccine in the hope that the vaccine will prevent infection with the majority of strains.  Developing effective vaccines requires not only scientific nous but an understanding of the daily challenges of those peoples whose lives are affected.  It is critical that they are centrally involved in the research program and understand both the hope and the limitations of the various approaches.  If not, it is unlikely they will persist in a collaborative program that may take many decades to realise ultimate success.  Malaria vaccine research, as an example, has provided a roller coaster emotional ride over the last 25 years for both researchers and those living in endemic countries. While this can be disconcerting it is critical that we continue for malaria and the many other challenges that we face.  The consequences of not doing so are too awful to contemplate. This was the World Day of Immunology 2009 Public Lecture. Presented by The John Curtin School of Medical Research and Australasian Society for Immunology.

In this lecture Dr Guy Pearse will spoke about the mindset that sees Australia's greatest asset as its mineral and energy resources - coal especially, asking how has this distorted our national politics and our response to climate change and what happens now that our coal-fired resources boom has gone bust? He also discussed the future of the coal industry and argued with the current economic orthodoxy. He looks at the shadowy world of greenhouse lobbyists; how they think and operate. Quarry vision, he argued, is a carbon-laced trap and a blind faith and a mentality we can no longer afford. This lecture comes from the March 2009 Quarterly Essay by Guy Pearse of the same name.

Like many other countries, Australia is facing significantly increased costs in the future in maintaining the health of its people.  In coming decades we will have more people suffering from chronic and debilitating health conditions such as diabetes, a higher proportion of older people with complex health care needs and burgeoning costs from new diagnostic and treatment technologies including pharmaceuticals. Another motivation for concern with current health financing arrangements is duplication in health insurance coverage.  Duplication arises because the Medicare coverage for public hospital services cannot be used for private hospital services.  Those who purchase private health insurance therefore have to pay a premium that covers the full cost of private hospital services and not just the additional cost of those services.  A large part of private health insurance coverage is therefore duplicate coverage while only a small part is supplementary coverage. Australia already spends around ten percent of its GDP on health care and some estimates show this increasing to over fifteen per cent by 2020 – an additional $50 billion each year. How will we pay for this? Are there better ways of financing and providing health care? This seminar discussed financing options based on Australian and international research undertaken through the Australian Centre for Economic Research on Health (ACERH) at ANU. The Speakers were Professor Jim Butler, Director ACERH; Dr Francesco Paolucci, research fellow ACERH; and Henry Ergas, Chairman, Concept Economics.

World Day of Immunology 2008 Public Lecture What defines us as individuals? What makes us both similar and different to other individuals, other species? These are great philosophical questions throughout the history of human thought, they are a source of angst in teenagers, and they are fundamental issues in medicine. In this lecture Professor Goodnow explores these questions from the perspective of our immune system, whose raison d’etre is to distinguish our self from the legions of viruses, bacteria and other microbes that would wish to take part in or take over our self. He will give examples of progress, opportunities and challenges in improving health outcomes from the struggle between our self, our genome and our microbes.

Human driven changes to the land surface have wide ranging influence on the functioning of the Earth System. The intensity of land cover change has increased rapidly over the last three hundred years, driven by population growth and increasing living standards. Expansion of agriculture and deforestation has significantly altered the environment. Recent development in land cover data sources enables us to obtain a reasonable overview of the global changes in land cover. Much less, however, is known about change in land use practices and agricultural and forest management that impact ecological services. In this lecture Professor Reenberg outlines the complexity of causes, processes and impacts of land change and call for a comprehensive framework to understand the human decisions that drive the global changes.

In this lecture Professor Dando reviews international control of the biotechnology revolution, the threat of deliberate disease - from biowarfare, bioterrorism, and the possible misuse of benignly intended civil research. He looks at the recent history of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and the emphasis on in-depth implementation of the Convention including codes of conduct and education for life scientists. Professor Dando argues that there is much evidence that life scientists know very little about these issues. There is a wider question of how this prohibition regime might be strengthened. He asks, could the education of life scientists be improved though the development of appropriate education modules?

The last five years have seen a remarkable increase in the level of financing and commitment in the war against AIDS, TB and Malaria. This period has also witnessed remarkable innovations in the business of development finance. The Global Fund has played a central role in both of these phenomena. Professor Sir Richard Feachem, who lead the Global Fund from its inception in 2002 until March 2007, discusses the fight against the great pandemics and the need to find a new architecture for development finance drawing on the experience of the first five years of the Global Fund. Professor Sir Richard will be cautiously optimistic about the struggle against HIV/AIDS, ambitious in his remarks on malaria, and provocative in his prescriptions for fundamental change in the way in which aid is provided.