Originally presented to the Australian government in February and made official earlier this month, the Australian 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap details the country’s plans to raise its profile and contributions to global scientific R&D over the next 10 years. The Roadmap identifies nine key areas that are essential in fostering R&D in Australia, including establishing nine focus areas of research, including Earth and environmental systems, biosecurity, complex biology and therapeutic development; establishing a National Research Infrastructure Advisory Group to advise the government on R&D investments; committing to educating and training for a more skilled workforce; continuing investments into existing R&D facilities; and collaborating more with global partners to increase reach and access to global R&D infrastructures.

The Roadmap indicates the need to grow opportunities for science industries, such as in complex biology, for which the Roadmap suggests increasing the scale and number of prospects to expand biomolecular R&D for technology platforms such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics. The Roadmap also identifies the need to create better infrastructures to enable clinical trials and to have more easily shared data between state and federal disease control databases.

Between 2005 and 2016, over AUD $2.8 billion ($2.1 billion) was invested in the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), which led to coinvestments from universities and state governments totaling over AUD $1 billion ($748.1 million). The Roadmap also points out the benefits of collaboration between research and industry, citing the Melbourne Biomedical Precinct as an example, which has raised over AUD $5 billion ($3.74 billion) to date from public and private investments. The majority of this investment has gone toward building state-of-the-art hospitals, as well as research buildings and infrastructure. The country’s leading biotechnology hub, the Bio21 Institute, is another example of this, with CSL, a large Australian biopharmaceutical company, investing AUD $36.4 million ($27.2 million) into the Institute for establishing more research infrastructure for chemical, bioengineering and biomedical R&D, including the CSL Global Hub for Research and Translational Medicine.

The Roadmap lists the nation’s top science R&D priorities as being in the areas of digital data and eResearch platforms for food, soil and water, energy, resources, advanced manufacturing, environmental change and health. These platforms will enable new methods for research, quality instrumentation and accelerated R&D.
Source: Australian Government: Department of Education and Training