A Phenome Future Phenome mapping is set to make WA a hub for health innovation.
Jan Hallam reports
It’s probably fair to say that Australia’s Cultural Cringe has come a long way down the recovery path in the past couple of decades. As a knowledge nation, we have become more confident in our capabilities, and within those confines, have made some amazing, life-changing discoveries.
“That’s when the concept of the Olympic legacy came up,” Jeremy told Medical Forum. “The drug testing facility was absolutely enormous, so I wrote to the Chief Medical Officer with an idea to take that equipment and put to it broader use for large scale population phenotyping to better inform on people’s health,” he said.
Think Marshall and Warren; Wilton and Fletcher; and numerous researchers of significant standing at institutions dotted around Perth and the country, all working on finding solutions to save lives.
“It ended up on the Prime Minister's desk and, three months later, we had £10 million from the Medical Research Council and another £11 million from industry to build transfer laboratories. When politics and science align, you can do something that's quite amazing.”
However, news several years ago that the state government and local universities, in particular Murdoch, were not only going to build a state-of-the-art phenome centre south of the river, but attract two of the world’s most respected names in the field to run it, sent more than a ripple or two within national and international research circles. Not least at Imperial College London where the now leader of the Australian National Phenome Centre, Professor Jeremy Nicholson, was head of the Department of Surgery and Cancer. He was one of the prime movers of Imperial’s phenome centre (the UK National Phenome Centre), which came into being as a happy indirect consequence of the enormous multi-billion pound spend on the London Olympic Games. 22 | FEBRUARY 2020
Those stars aligned in southern skies several years on, when other collaborative phenome centres were established in Hong Kong and Singapore, creating some seriously big health data capacity in the southern hemisphere. The idea was to have these large-scale facilities harmonise technology and approach so that the studies on the biology of disease could have global consequences. “About four years ago, this Australian guy came bouncing up to me at a lecture I was giving in the US and announced ‘we’d like a phenome centre, too’. That guy was A/Professor Rob Trengove who was running the metabolic laboratory here at Murdoch,” Jeremy said. Talks with the Murdoch hierarchy about the scientific possibilities of a WA phenome centre quickly moved on to the Chief Science Officer, Prof Peter Klinken, and the Health Minister, Roger Cook, who had made no secret that on his watch he wanted to see an overburdened MEDICAL FORUM | INNOVATION & TRENDS ISSUE
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