Australia offers rich opportunities for r&d

Australia is rapidly gaining international recognition in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries as an attractive environment for conducting clinical trials.

This reputation has been reinforced by a pharmaceutical benchmarking survey, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which ranked Australia as the leading location for clinical trials ahead of the UK, US, Germany, India, Japan and Singapore.

UK pharmaceutical companies undertaking clinical trials and developing new products are setting up Australian bases to find out whether their innovations will succeed, according to Nicola Watkinson, senior investment commissioner for Europe at Invest Australia, the Australian Government's investment attraction agency.

Around 700 clinical trials are performed in more than 2,000 sites around Australia annually. 'Keys reason are that Australia ranks as one of the lowest cost business locations in the industrialised world and its cost of living is the third lowest in the developed world,' said Watkinson. The EIU benchmarking study ranked Australia ahead of Japan, UK, Germany and the US for costs associated with running a typical pharmaceutical company.

Another advantage of setting up an Australian base is that Australian organisations are easy to do business with and have strong abilities and experience in interacting with both Western and Asian cultures. 'Australian organisations are hungry for partnerships and have established them with organisations across the world,' Watkinson added.

According to GlaxoSmithKline's medical director, Mike Elliott, 'Speed, cost and quality are essential to completing successful trials and these criteria are met in Australia.'

Australia's multi-cultural population also makes it well positioned to perform studies of defined ethnic groups. It encompasses people from 200 different countries and offers a microcosm of the world's populations, allowing for simultaneous testing against the preferences of numerous ethnic or linguistic groups.

The country's reverse seasonality with the Northern Hemisphere also provides UK pharmaceutical companies with the opportunity to trial new drugs or vaccines for seasonal diseases like influenza, asthma, and hay fever.

According to Professor Graham Macdonald, external licensing co-ordinator for Merck Sharp & Dohme in Australia, there are a number of reasons why the Australian biotechnology industry is attracting overseas interest. 'The industry offers exceptional scientific talent, high quality r&d, strong intellectual property laws and excellent research facilities, which makes it very attractive to overseas investors,' he said. 'The potential for producing scientific data on which to base advances in pharmaceutical and other medical treatments is considerable.'

Invest Australia includes a team dedicated to finding investment opportunities and partners in Australia's biotechnology and pharmaceutical sectors.