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Moonshot or myth: Can Australia be the healthiest country in the world?Transcript
Host: Good morning everyone. Welcome to this stunning morning in sunny Sydney. Welcome to a Vivid event. My name is Chris [indistinct 0.14] and I am very pleased to join you here on a morning such as this, and on an occasion such as this. Before we begin, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we’re meeting today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nations, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. You should also note that even though you’re sitting in this room with this tremendous view out the window, which of course you won’t be looking at because everyone’s speaking is going to be riveting, this is your experience. But we are in fact webcasting right now, so hello everyone in cyberspace, I hope that your environments are as lovely as ours are.
Today, ladies and gentlemen, we consider the health of the nation. It’s a subject close to all of our hearts and indeed the rest of us as well, I suppose. I think that in the last few hundred years human physiology hasn’t really changed very much but everything else has. Society is constantly in upheaval and changing, and in an era of increased connectedness, advanced technology and big data, it really does seem like everything else has changed. So what does that mean for the health of people and the health of societies, and the health of this nation? And what exactly does that mean for the way that we address this in terms of our research and innovation?
Today we will hear from CSIRO who, with their partners in industry and in the university sector and in the private sector, are doing their very best to actually change what it means to be a healthy human. In fact we might be entering a new era in the way we think about our health. Perhaps we are entering a time when we stop thinking about the science of illness and rather start thinking about the science of wellness. But don’t take it from me. Today we have gone right to the top, we have with us the Chief Executive of CSIRO, Dr Larry Marshall, and he will make all of that make much more sense. When he’s finished speaking we have time for questions and answers, so please don’t go anywhere. If you have any thoughts while Larry is speaking, note them down, don’t forget them because we really want to hear them. Following that, we will have plenty of time for networking, getting to know people a little bit better. So will you please now put your hands together and give a massive warm Sydney winter meeting for Dr Larry Marshall.
[Applause]
[Video playing]
A catalyst, it creates a reaction, it creates change faster. CSIRO is Australia’s innovation catalyst. We bring Australia’s innovation ecosystem together to transform Australia’s big challenges into global opportunities. We collaborate with our partners across industry, government, research and community to make it all happen. We seek and seize what’s next on the horizon. We create solutions through science. CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency. We wake up each morning because we’re making tomorrow and the future better, better for people, for business and for the planet. We believe change is good but transformation is better, and innovation is where it starts. For CSIRO, Australia’s innovation catalyst, your innovation catalyst.
Larry: Thank you. Now can I also begin formally by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as the traditional owners of the land that we’re meeting on here today and pay my respects to their elders, both past and present.
Look, thank you for getting up this early on this somewhat rainy Sydney morning. It’s even harder when we’re right at the start of the flu season, so really good to see you all. And of course CSIRO has tried to do its bit to counteract the flu season. As you may or may not know, CSIRO invented the original Relenza flu vaccine. But as I’ll discuss today, a role in protecting your health has broadened considerably since then.
So the question for today, this moon shot idea, can Australia truly be the healthiest nation on earth? Without question it’s a moon shot and will take many different parties across the system working together in bold, new, innovative ways. But moon shots are really nothing new for CSIRO and nor are they new for Australia. In fact you probably know well that CSIRO in particular in Australia in general supported masses original moon shot with those first images from Apollo 11 being beamed back to CSIRO’s facilities in parks, the famous dish, and also at Tidbinbilla in Canberra in 1969. So to consider our chances at this new health moon shot, I’d like to share a little bit about our health history and then look a little bit at our health future, and then I’ll give you some personal insights towards the end as to why I think Australia really can deliver.
So the seeds of healthy innovation were planted by our earliest people in this country. For example, Aboriginal people living in the far north of Queensland used to soak, scrape and cook otherwise toxic seeds, like black beans to make them a safer, nutritious part of their diet. For the past hundred years or so CSIRO has played an important role in continuing that critical mission. In the 1920s CSIRO scientists were hard at work on two very different crops. In Griffith here in New South Wales scientists were experimenting with orchards at the Commonwealth Citrus Research Station testing the effectiveness of things like soil and fertiliser types, different bud selection methods, and different irrigation strategies. If you read CSIROs 1927 annual report, the purpose of their work and the clear customer focus were really apparent, and they said, ‘it’s essential for Australia to be able to place the highest grade standard fruit on foreign markets if it is to compete successfully with other countries’. Given a trip from Sydney to Plymouth by the fastest ship available still took three months, perhaps growing fruit for export from Australia to the rest of the world was a bit of a moon shot back then.
The second crop that CSIRO had been working on was the prickly pear. This was a crop that had been imported to Australia in an ill-fated effort to harvest its red coloured dye. And unfortunately the fruit bearing cactus flourished to become an obnoxious weed across the entire country. And by the mid-1920s it had taken over more than 60 million acres of land, thwarting crops and starving livestock. So in partnership with the New South Wales government and the Queensland government, and by the way this is before the State of Origin, the CSIRO scientists carefully experimented with a range of insects to eat the prickly pear, but they had almost no success. But like any good entrepreneur, they treated these early failures as learnings. And finally, after many tries, they discovered that the larvae from the Argentinian moth was very effective. And they released these larvae and within 10 years the reign of the prickly pear was over.
Now this is one of the very few large scale environmental interventions of the Western world that actually worked. And it set the stage for future interventions, like curing the rabbit plague, like curing the fly plague, like breeding disease resistant wheat and other crops. In all, there are five major environmental interventions that CSIRO has given to Australia to make life better for all Australians. And just for the record, we had nothing to do with the cane toad or cockroaches.
So I wanted to start today by talking about our long Australian connection with the land and its produce because of its enduring connection to our health even a century later. Not only do we know more than ever about the importance of diet, even down to personalising it for our individual genes, but the most sophisticated models of health today look at every single element of our environment to understand a truly holistic picture of disease. So let me talk about our work and health and what innovation and health looks like today, and what it might look like going forward. It may surprise you to see how some of our work that was done a century ago is still relevant to a healthy Australia and even a healthier world today.
A few years ago we recognised the rising importance of cross disciplinary approach to a new era of challenges and opportunities, some of which I’ll discuss this morning. So we brought together people from all across the organisation, from every discipline of science, and we created a new health business unit for CSIRO and for the nation. Now the internal change simply reflects the global movement towards one health. It came from the epiphany that in the last hundred years CSIRO had created one of the largest genetics groups in Australia. We also made major environmental interventions to make life better, that it had all been around plants, animals and water. But if you look today, those three things are the sources of most major disease. Major pandemics no longer discriminate between animals and humans. So it’s time for us to really step up again to a new challenge facing Australia. We also announced a new programme of investment at CSIRO into areas of cutting edge pure science that we believed have the power to transform our existing industries and even possibly create new ones. We call them Future of Science Platforms. And this programme that we’ve been pushing in the Future Science Platforms we call Precision Health.
Now Precision Health harnesses the power of big data, including clinical, laboratory and genetic data, to generate whole new insights and improved treatments tailored specifically for individuals. It’s a rapidly accelerating field powered by advances in biosciences like gene sequencing, understanding the interactions at the microbiome level of our bodies, and seeing differences in how genes are expressed through emerging work in the field of epigenetics. Precision Health means we can shift our emphasis from treating the illness towards keeping people from getting the illness in the first place by better predicting and even delaying the onset of chronic disease. Means we can adopt a wider view of health beyond the 10% that is driven by clinical care to include other key influences of health, like our genes and our gut microbiome. What do they say about us? Considered along with environmental behaviour and social factors. And we can capture, integrate, and analyse big datasets to build personal health profiles moving from a one size fits all approach to a more effective personalised solution. Now these are the big trends in Precision Health.
At CSIRO we’ve been working specifically on developing an integrated platform that can be used proactively to manage your health throughout the course of your life, designed literally for a customer of one, you. It will feature highly tailored food and nutrition, lifestyle interventions reflecting community expectations and attitudes, and building on programmes and developments already underway in the medical field. Another specific project at CSIRO is focused on developing a way to monitor in real time complex processes in the human body that can be the early warning signs of disease. We’re working on the next generation of wearable sensors for wellbeing and one of the first, if you can see it, looks a bit like this. It’s a tiny, unobtrusive sensor that people with diabetes can wear to monitor their individual glucose levels. This tech could also be used by people at high risk of developing diabetes to help them regulate their diet and lifestyle to avoid getting the disease.
On the topic of wearables, what about customising replacement body parts? Our advance manufacturing teams have been supporting Australia’s booming medtech sector. And in the past few years we’ve partnered with an Aussie start-up called Anatomics to 3D print customised replacement body parts that have saved the lives of patients around the world. Now this is a titanium sternum that was custom made for a New York patient who was 20 years old, Penelope Heller, who’d been diagnosed with cancer three years earlier. Now this combination of digital and materials technology can literally save lives anywhere in the world. So Precision Health can help us more accurately personalise our interventions.
What do those interventions actually look like? I mentioned earlier that our crops have played a critical role in our research for decades, from strengthening citrus crops to demolishing the invasive prickly pear. But today our agricultural research is improving the health credentials of Australian crops in ways the team monitoring the orchards back in Griffith could never have imagined. Never mind exporting Australian oranges back then, today we can add so much unique and innovative value to Australian grown produce that we can actually resell it to the countries who used to produce the world’s best. You might already be familiar with some of these products, for example, BARLEYmax grain. It’s a CSIRO developed wholegrain with boosted levels of fibre and resistant starch that can help combat cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer. It’s already in supermarkets across the country but you might not have realised it was created by your national science agency.
Now if you’re headed to Germany for Oktoberfest this year, see if you can pick up a bottle of CSIRO beer, it’s called Kebari. The brand name is Pioneer, and it’s brewed from a CSIRO developed new strain of barley that’s officially recognised by the World Health Organisation as gluten free. Now last year we sold it to the world’s connoisseurs of beer, Germany, to brew gluten free beer. But soon we’re hoping you’ll see it brewed in Australia. If you’re headed to the US, and you’re craving a bagel or a pretzel or a pizza or anything else with a wheat base, you can do your health a favour and try and pick up one of the products developed with CSIRO developed high-amylose wheat. Now this wheat has extra high levels of resistant starch, again, to help protect against diseases like bowel cancer and Type 2 diabetes. Late last year we started commercialising this healthier grain in the United States to combat the world’s worst obesity problem. Now these grains are just the entree, literally, from CSIRO Science Delicatessen of high values foods all developed here in Australia.
Now in addition to boosting the health of all Australians, we identify that these high value foods are really a strategic advantage also for Australia. So we’ve stepped up our research in the field to grow our national economy at the same time as we grow our national health outcomes. But it’s not just our big agricultural partners that are benefitting from this. There are many, many small and medium enterprises and start-ups that we’re helping grow in this sector as well. Now you might’ve picked up in the lobby a bottle of Preshafruit. This juice is manufactured by a small Victorian company called Preshafood who worked with CSIRO to develop a premium fruit juice, series of premium fruit juices, that are pasteurised using high pressure processing, and not heat. We call it HPP. Now the technology has the potential to extend the shelf life of chilled perishable products and provide improved safety, taste, quality and nutritional value without having to use chemical preservatives. Now Preshafood started its life inside our world class pilot plant at CSIRO Werribee. But they recently expanded their investment in HPP technology to become the largest HPP operation in Australia. They’ve created new jobs by growing sales both in Australia and in export markets, and they’re starting to really be pulled into the booming market in Asia. It’s a long way to where we started 100 years ago testing soil and irrigation to ensure our orange exports could be competitive.
Now while we were opening up new export opportunities with high value foods, increased global transport is also creating new threats to our biosecurity, and therefore our health. As I mentioned earlier, the most sophisticated models of health now acknowledge the human, animal and ecosystem health are inextricably linked together. It’s a model called One Health. Over the past 30 years we’ve seen an increase in emerging infectious diseases with more than 70% of them emerging first in animals and then passed to humans. It means that the value of bringing together a diverse range of expertise for any given challenge is now essential to seeing all sides of a threat. Now hopefully as part of the wonderful Vivid festival you’ve had the chance to see the CSIRO light installation here on George Street just around the corner, in the Rocks. If you have, you’ll have seen the beautiful but dangerous images of Hendra, Ebola, Zika, and influenza viruses displayed in stunning detail, magnified a billion times. And work on these biosecurity threats takes place at our Australian animal health laboratory in Geelong, or as we like to think of it now, the All Australian Health Laboratory.
Originally built as an animal biosecurity facility, AAHL is one of only six high containment animal research centres in the world. They work on national and international human and animal health issues as part of a global One Health network. In recent years AAHL has expanded its research from protection of our livestock to work across the entire human and animal infectious disease spectrum. And in the past few years our teams have contributed to global efforts to understand and fight outbreaks as well as bolstering Australia’s defences against new emerging threats.
It’s remarkable to think in a few short decades CSIRO has evolved from the inventor of Aerogard to keep mosquitos from biting you, to now bioengineer both the mosquito and the virus to treat Zika and malaria. So we’re really on the front foot in protecting against and preparing for outbreaks. But we’re also applying a cross disciplinary approach to improve Australian health services. Bringing together medical and digital, we’ve developed science to help hospitals literally predict how many patients will arrive in an emergency, what their medical needs will be, and how many will be admitted or discharged. The patient administration prediction tool, or PAPT, draws on a hospital’s historical data to provide an accurate prediction of their future. It’s currently being used by more than 30 Queensland hospitals and it’s on trial currently in Victoria. We can also transform the rehabilitation experience for patients, including apps that we’ve developed, for example, for knee surgery recovery and for cardiac recovery. Both alleviate the pressure on our hospital system and on our health professionals while at the same time significantly increasing patient comfort and patient outcomes because we enable them to recover in the comfort of their own home.
We can also connect our most remote citizens to health specialists in our cities through platforms like Coviu. Coviu is a new telehealth start-up that recently emerged from CSIRO incubated technology and CSIRO people. It was accelerated through our national science accelerator, called ON, which takes science off the benchtop, into beta, and ultimately to buyer. And then just last month it picked up investment from the CSIRO National Innovation Fund Main Sequence Ventures. Coviu is a cloud based healthcare experience that enables augmented reality consultations with a clinician anywhere in Australia. And it’s an easy one click video communication system combined with intelligent diagnostic tools to back it up. So the digital revolution is not just harnessing the power of big data to inform Precision Health, but it’s actually enabling delivery of top quality health services wherever they’re needed in this country.
So I’ve talked a bit this morning about our history in health innovation, and I’ve shared a little bit about what’s around the corner. There’s one more story I’d like to share before I weigh up our chances on this moon shot. I want to tell you about why it’s personally important to me. So I was an intern at CSIRO 30 years ago, and it was through seeing the deep impact that research done at CSIRO could deliver for the country that I realised the power of science to transform lives. So when I finished my PhD I tried my hand at commercialising some of my own inventions and spent the next 20 years doing it in Silicon Valley. The invention that got me hooked on founding companies was the world’s first solid state green laser to cure blindness in diabetics. Now as our company grew we provided a range of lasers to ophthalmologists, and later to dermatologists. A few years later I was woken up in the middle of the night by my eight year old daughter saying, ‘daddy, there’s something wrong’. I turned on the light to see her face literally covered in blood. A small vessel had burst on her nose and when the bleeding didn’t stop easily I realised it was the vessel that’s connected to the ophthalmic artery, which I only remember because we founded an ophthalmic company. Now this is the first branch of the carotid artery, so it’s a very high pressure bleed to have. And for a while it was rupturing every second day with disastrous results.
So two weeks later we got rushed to a surgeon’s lab in San Francisco and he pulled out, guess who’s laser, and cauterised the offending vessel on her nose. But when he finished my daughter turned to him and said, ‘I’m lucky my daddy is a doctor’. And the doctor said, ‘no, you’re lucky he’s an entrepreneur and I’m a doctor’. The truth is, as US residents at the time we were all lucky that we had health insurance. CSIRO had an epiphany a few years ago and we responded by bringing together a really broad cross section of our science to tackle today’s health challenges.
Today I’d like you to consider having the same epiphany that we had and realising that everything is interconnected. Our environment, our water, our plants, our animals, and our humans. We used to consider all of these elements separate, but our future is the intersection of all of them into a truly One Health approach. The One Health model means that we now understand that the solutions won’t come from one single discipline, nor will they come from one single institution. The challenges are complex, and they need innovative, collaborative, new approaches. But at CSIRO we know that true innovation happens at the intersection of people and perspectives. Each of the recent breakthroughs I described today came from multiple fields of science working collaboratively together. At CSIRO our innovation catalyst strategy is all about bringing the best and brightest together, from every field necessary to use the best science to create real world solutions to whatever challenges face our nation. At CSIRO, we’re all about delivering the moon shots. This is why I think Australia’s moon shot to become the healthiest nation in the world is well within our reach. Because in Australia we believe you shouldn’t have to be lucky to access the right doctor and the right treatment, we believe that not only should kids be able to access lasers to cure their eyes, but they should be growing up to invent the next generation of innovation for their children and doing it right here in Australia.
When Bill Ferris and the Innovation and Science Australia Board released their 2030 report a few months back, they called for Australia to rally around this national mission. They proposed it not just because we could all be healthier, but because it inspires the next generation of health innovators. A hundred years ago Australians trusted CSIRO to improve their fruit export and rid our land of invasive pests. Over the years we’ve delivered treatments for the flu and diets for our wellbeing. And tomorrow we’ll deliver personalised healthcare right down to the gene and out to the furthest reaches of our wide, brown land. A sustainable model for health, one that can make us the healthiest nation in the world, can’t just be about treatment. We have to get ahead with prevention. CSIRO has a long and proud history of delivering moon shots across any number of endeavours, and health is no different. As JFK said, ‘we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the very best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept and one that we are unwilling to postpone and one that we intend to win’. Australia is unwilling to postpone being the healthiest nation in the world. Australia has a great advantage in this moon shot because we recognise that health today means health across the whole system. At CSIRO it’s in our DNA, not just to deliver the national missions, but to deliver national benefit and improve the life of every single Australian. That’s the real moon shot, no-one left behind. Thank you.
[Applause]
Today, ladies and gentlemen, we consider the health of the nation. It’s a subject close to all of our hearts and indeed the rest of us as well, I suppose. I think that in the last few hundred years human physiology hasn’t really changed very much but everything else has. Society is constantly in upheaval and changing, and in an era of increased connectedness, advanced technology and big data, it really does seem like everything else has changed. So what does that mean for the health of people and the health of societies, and the health of this nation? And what exactly does that mean for the way that we address this in terms of our research and innovation?
Today we will hear from CSIRO who, with their partners in industry and in the university sector and in the private sector, are doing their very best to actually change what it means to be a healthy human. In fact we might be entering a new era in the way we think about our health. Perhaps we are entering a time when we stop thinking about the science of illness and rather start thinking about the science of wellness. But don’t take it from me. Today we have gone right to the top, we have with us the Chief Executive of CSIRO, Dr Larry Marshall, and he will make all of that make much more sense. When he’s finished speaking we have time for questions and answers, so please don’t go anywhere. If you have any thoughts while Larry is speaking, note them down, don’t forget them because we really want to hear them. Following that, we will have plenty of time for networking, getting to know people a little bit better. So will you please now put your hands together and give a massive warm Sydney winter meeting for Dr Larry Marshall.
[Applause]
[Video playing]
A catalyst, it creates a reaction, it creates change faster. CSIRO is Australia’s innovation catalyst. We bring Australia’s innovation ecosystem together to transform Australia’s big challenges into global opportunities. We collaborate with our partners across industry, government, research and community to make it all happen. We seek and seize what’s next on the horizon. We create solutions through science. CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency. We wake up each morning because we’re making tomorrow and the future better, better for people, for business and for the planet. We believe change is good but transformation is better, and innovation is where it starts. For CSIRO, Australia’s innovation catalyst, your innovation catalyst.
Larry: Thank you. Now can I also begin formally by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as the traditional owners of the land that we’re meeting on here today and pay my respects to their elders, both past and present.
Look, thank you for getting up this early on this somewhat rainy Sydney morning. It’s even harder when we’re right at the start of the flu season, so really good to see you all. And of course CSIRO has tried to do its bit to counteract the flu season. As you may or may not know, CSIRO invented the original Relenza flu vaccine. But as I’ll discuss today, a role in protecting your health has broadened considerably since then.
So the question for today, this moon shot idea, can Australia truly be the healthiest nation on earth? Without question it’s a moon shot and will take many different parties across the system working together in bold, new, innovative ways. But moon shots are really nothing new for CSIRO and nor are they new for Australia. In fact you probably know well that CSIRO in particular in Australia in general supported masses original moon shot with those first images from Apollo 11 being beamed back to CSIRO’s facilities in parks, the famous dish, and also at Tidbinbilla in Canberra in 1969. So to consider our chances at this new health moon shot, I’d like to share a little bit about our health history and then look a little bit at our health future, and then I’ll give you some personal insights towards the end as to why I think Australia really can deliver.
So the seeds of healthy innovation were planted by our earliest people in this country. For example, Aboriginal people living in the far north of Queensland used to soak, scrape and cook otherwise toxic seeds, like black beans to make them a safer, nutritious part of their diet. For the past hundred years or so CSIRO has played an important role in continuing that critical mission. In the 1920s CSIRO scientists were hard at work on two very different crops. In Griffith here in New South Wales scientists were experimenting with orchards at the Commonwealth Citrus Research Station testing the effectiveness of things like soil and fertiliser types, different bud selection methods, and different irrigation strategies. If you read CSIROs 1927 annual report, the purpose of their work and the clear customer focus were really apparent, and they said, ‘it’s essential for Australia to be able to place the highest grade standard fruit on foreign markets if it is to compete successfully with other countries’. Given a trip from Sydney to Plymouth by the fastest ship available still took three months, perhaps growing fruit for export from Australia to the rest of the world was a bit of a moon shot back then.
The second crop that CSIRO had been working on was the prickly pear. This was a crop that had been imported to Australia in an ill-fated effort to harvest its red coloured dye. And unfortunately the fruit bearing cactus flourished to become an obnoxious weed across the entire country. And by the mid-1920s it had taken over more than 60 million acres of land, thwarting crops and starving livestock. So in partnership with the New South Wales government and the Queensland government, and by the way this is before the State of Origin, the CSIRO scientists carefully experimented with a range of insects to eat the prickly pear, but they had almost no success. But like any good entrepreneur, they treated these early failures as learnings. And finally, after many tries, they discovered that the larvae from the Argentinian moth was very effective. And they released these larvae and within 10 years the reign of the prickly pear was over.
Now this is one of the very few large scale environmental interventions of the Western world that actually worked. And it set the stage for future interventions, like curing the rabbit plague, like curing the fly plague, like breeding disease resistant wheat and other crops. In all, there are five major environmental interventions that CSIRO has given to Australia to make life better for all Australians. And just for the record, we had nothing to do with the cane toad or cockroaches.
So I wanted to start today by talking about our long Australian connection with the land and its produce because of its enduring connection to our health even a century later. Not only do we know more than ever about the importance of diet, even down to personalising it for our individual genes, but the most sophisticated models of health today look at every single element of our environment to understand a truly holistic picture of disease. So let me talk about our work and health and what innovation and health looks like today, and what it might look like going forward. It may surprise you to see how some of our work that was done a century ago is still relevant to a healthy Australia and even a healthier world today.
A few years ago we recognised the rising importance of cross disciplinary approach to a new era of challenges and opportunities, some of which I’ll discuss this morning. So we brought together people from all across the organisation, from every discipline of science, and we created a new health business unit for CSIRO and for the nation. Now the internal change simply reflects the global movement towards one health. It came from the epiphany that in the last hundred years CSIRO had created one of the largest genetics groups in Australia. We also made major environmental interventions to make life better, that it had all been around plants, animals and water. But if you look today, those three things are the sources of most major disease. Major pandemics no longer discriminate between animals and humans. So it’s time for us to really step up again to a new challenge facing Australia. We also announced a new programme of investment at CSIRO into areas of cutting edge pure science that we believed have the power to transform our existing industries and even possibly create new ones. We call them Future of Science Platforms. And this programme that we’ve been pushing in the Future Science Platforms we call Precision Health.
Now Precision Health harnesses the power of big data, including clinical, laboratory and genetic data, to generate whole new insights and improved treatments tailored specifically for individuals. It’s a rapidly accelerating field powered by advances in biosciences like gene sequencing, understanding the interactions at the microbiome level of our bodies, and seeing differences in how genes are expressed through emerging work in the field of epigenetics. Precision Health means we can shift our emphasis from treating the illness towards keeping people from getting the illness in the first place by better predicting and even delaying the onset of chronic disease. Means we can adopt a wider view of health beyond the 10% that is driven by clinical care to include other key influences of health, like our genes and our gut microbiome. What do they say about us? Considered along with environmental behaviour and social factors. And we can capture, integrate, and analyse big datasets to build personal health profiles moving from a one size fits all approach to a more effective personalised solution. Now these are the big trends in Precision Health.
At CSIRO we’ve been working specifically on developing an integrated platform that can be used proactively to manage your health throughout the course of your life, designed literally for a customer of one, you. It will feature highly tailored food and nutrition, lifestyle interventions reflecting community expectations and attitudes, and building on programmes and developments already underway in the medical field. Another specific project at CSIRO is focused on developing a way to monitor in real time complex processes in the human body that can be the early warning signs of disease. We’re working on the next generation of wearable sensors for wellbeing and one of the first, if you can see it, looks a bit like this. It’s a tiny, unobtrusive sensor that people with diabetes can wear to monitor their individual glucose levels. This tech could also be used by people at high risk of developing diabetes to help them regulate their diet and lifestyle to avoid getting the disease.
On the topic of wearables, what about customising replacement body parts? Our advance manufacturing teams have been supporting Australia’s booming medtech sector. And in the past few years we’ve partnered with an Aussie start-up called Anatomics to 3D print customised replacement body parts that have saved the lives of patients around the world. Now this is a titanium sternum that was custom made for a New York patient who was 20 years old, Penelope Heller, who’d been diagnosed with cancer three years earlier. Now this combination of digital and materials technology can literally save lives anywhere in the world. So Precision Health can help us more accurately personalise our interventions.
What do those interventions actually look like? I mentioned earlier that our crops have played a critical role in our research for decades, from strengthening citrus crops to demolishing the invasive prickly pear. But today our agricultural research is improving the health credentials of Australian crops in ways the team monitoring the orchards back in Griffith could never have imagined. Never mind exporting Australian oranges back then, today we can add so much unique and innovative value to Australian grown produce that we can actually resell it to the countries who used to produce the world’s best. You might already be familiar with some of these products, for example, BARLEYmax grain. It’s a CSIRO developed wholegrain with boosted levels of fibre and resistant starch that can help combat cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and colorectal cancer. It’s already in supermarkets across the country but you might not have realised it was created by your national science agency.
Now if you’re headed to Germany for Oktoberfest this year, see if you can pick up a bottle of CSIRO beer, it’s called Kebari. The brand name is Pioneer, and it’s brewed from a CSIRO developed new strain of barley that’s officially recognised by the World Health Organisation as gluten free. Now last year we sold it to the world’s connoisseurs of beer, Germany, to brew gluten free beer. But soon we’re hoping you’ll see it brewed in Australia. If you’re headed to the US, and you’re craving a bagel or a pretzel or a pizza or anything else with a wheat base, you can do your health a favour and try and pick up one of the products developed with CSIRO developed high-amylose wheat. Now this wheat has extra high levels of resistant starch, again, to help protect against diseases like bowel cancer and Type 2 diabetes. Late last year we started commercialising this healthier grain in the United States to combat the world’s worst obesity problem. Now these grains are just the entree, literally, from CSIRO Science Delicatessen of high values foods all developed here in Australia.
Now in addition to boosting the health of all Australians, we identify that these high value foods are really a strategic advantage also for Australia. So we’ve stepped up our research in the field to grow our national economy at the same time as we grow our national health outcomes. But it’s not just our big agricultural partners that are benefitting from this. There are many, many small and medium enterprises and start-ups that we’re helping grow in this sector as well. Now you might’ve picked up in the lobby a bottle of Preshafruit. This juice is manufactured by a small Victorian company called Preshafood who worked with CSIRO to develop a premium fruit juice, series of premium fruit juices, that are pasteurised using high pressure processing, and not heat. We call it HPP. Now the technology has the potential to extend the shelf life of chilled perishable products and provide improved safety, taste, quality and nutritional value without having to use chemical preservatives. Now Preshafood started its life inside our world class pilot plant at CSIRO Werribee. But they recently expanded their investment in HPP technology to become the largest HPP operation in Australia. They’ve created new jobs by growing sales both in Australia and in export markets, and they’re starting to really be pulled into the booming market in Asia. It’s a long way to where we started 100 years ago testing soil and irrigation to ensure our orange exports could be competitive.
Now while we were opening up new export opportunities with high value foods, increased global transport is also creating new threats to our biosecurity, and therefore our health. As I mentioned earlier, the most sophisticated models of health now acknowledge the human, animal and ecosystem health are inextricably linked together. It’s a model called One Health. Over the past 30 years we’ve seen an increase in emerging infectious diseases with more than 70% of them emerging first in animals and then passed to humans. It means that the value of bringing together a diverse range of expertise for any given challenge is now essential to seeing all sides of a threat. Now hopefully as part of the wonderful Vivid festival you’ve had the chance to see the CSIRO light installation here on George Street just around the corner, in the Rocks. If you have, you’ll have seen the beautiful but dangerous images of Hendra, Ebola, Zika, and influenza viruses displayed in stunning detail, magnified a billion times. And work on these biosecurity threats takes place at our Australian animal health laboratory in Geelong, or as we like to think of it now, the All Australian Health Laboratory.
Originally built as an animal biosecurity facility, AAHL is one of only six high containment animal research centres in the world. They work on national and international human and animal health issues as part of a global One Health network. In recent years AAHL has expanded its research from protection of our livestock to work across the entire human and animal infectious disease spectrum. And in the past few years our teams have contributed to global efforts to understand and fight outbreaks as well as bolstering Australia’s defences against new emerging threats.
It’s remarkable to think in a few short decades CSIRO has evolved from the inventor of Aerogard to keep mosquitos from biting you, to now bioengineer both the mosquito and the virus to treat Zika and malaria. So we’re really on the front foot in protecting against and preparing for outbreaks. But we’re also applying a cross disciplinary approach to improve Australian health services. Bringing together medical and digital, we’ve developed science to help hospitals literally predict how many patients will arrive in an emergency, what their medical needs will be, and how many will be admitted or discharged. The patient administration prediction tool, or PAPT, draws on a hospital’s historical data to provide an accurate prediction of their future. It’s currently being used by more than 30 Queensland hospitals and it’s on trial currently in Victoria. We can also transform the rehabilitation experience for patients, including apps that we’ve developed, for example, for knee surgery recovery and for cardiac recovery. Both alleviate the pressure on our hospital system and on our health professionals while at the same time significantly increasing patient comfort and patient outcomes because we enable them to recover in the comfort of their own home.
We can also connect our most remote citizens to health specialists in our cities through platforms like Coviu. Coviu is a new telehealth start-up that recently emerged from CSIRO incubated technology and CSIRO people. It was accelerated through our national science accelerator, called ON, which takes science off the benchtop, into beta, and ultimately to buyer. And then just last month it picked up investment from the CSIRO National Innovation Fund Main Sequence Ventures. Coviu is a cloud based healthcare experience that enables augmented reality consultations with a clinician anywhere in Australia. And it’s an easy one click video communication system combined with intelligent diagnostic tools to back it up. So the digital revolution is not just harnessing the power of big data to inform Precision Health, but it’s actually enabling delivery of top quality health services wherever they’re needed in this country.
So I’ve talked a bit this morning about our history in health innovation, and I’ve shared a little bit about what’s around the corner. There’s one more story I’d like to share before I weigh up our chances on this moon shot. I want to tell you about why it’s personally important to me. So I was an intern at CSIRO 30 years ago, and it was through seeing the deep impact that research done at CSIRO could deliver for the country that I realised the power of science to transform lives. So when I finished my PhD I tried my hand at commercialising some of my own inventions and spent the next 20 years doing it in Silicon Valley. The invention that got me hooked on founding companies was the world’s first solid state green laser to cure blindness in diabetics. Now as our company grew we provided a range of lasers to ophthalmologists, and later to dermatologists. A few years later I was woken up in the middle of the night by my eight year old daughter saying, ‘daddy, there’s something wrong’. I turned on the light to see her face literally covered in blood. A small vessel had burst on her nose and when the bleeding didn’t stop easily I realised it was the vessel that’s connected to the ophthalmic artery, which I only remember because we founded an ophthalmic company. Now this is the first branch of the carotid artery, so it’s a very high pressure bleed to have. And for a while it was rupturing every second day with disastrous results.
So two weeks later we got rushed to a surgeon’s lab in San Francisco and he pulled out, guess who’s laser, and cauterised the offending vessel on her nose. But when he finished my daughter turned to him and said, ‘I’m lucky my daddy is a doctor’. And the doctor said, ‘no, you’re lucky he’s an entrepreneur and I’m a doctor’. The truth is, as US residents at the time we were all lucky that we had health insurance. CSIRO had an epiphany a few years ago and we responded by bringing together a really broad cross section of our science to tackle today’s health challenges.
Today I’d like you to consider having the same epiphany that we had and realising that everything is interconnected. Our environment, our water, our plants, our animals, and our humans. We used to consider all of these elements separate, but our future is the intersection of all of them into a truly One Health approach. The One Health model means that we now understand that the solutions won’t come from one single discipline, nor will they come from one single institution. The challenges are complex, and they need innovative, collaborative, new approaches. But at CSIRO we know that true innovation happens at the intersection of people and perspectives. Each of the recent breakthroughs I described today came from multiple fields of science working collaboratively together. At CSIRO our innovation catalyst strategy is all about bringing the best and brightest together, from every field necessary to use the best science to create real world solutions to whatever challenges face our nation. At CSIRO, we’re all about delivering the moon shots. This is why I think Australia’s moon shot to become the healthiest nation in the world is well within our reach. Because in Australia we believe you shouldn’t have to be lucky to access the right doctor and the right treatment, we believe that not only should kids be able to access lasers to cure their eyes, but they should be growing up to invent the next generation of innovation for their children and doing it right here in Australia.
When Bill Ferris and the Innovation and Science Australia Board released their 2030 report a few months back, they called for Australia to rally around this national mission. They proposed it not just because we could all be healthier, but because it inspires the next generation of health innovators. A hundred years ago Australians trusted CSIRO to improve their fruit export and rid our land of invasive pests. Over the years we’ve delivered treatments for the flu and diets for our wellbeing. And tomorrow we’ll deliver personalised healthcare right down to the gene and out to the furthest reaches of our wide, brown land. A sustainable model for health, one that can make us the healthiest nation in the world, can’t just be about treatment. We have to get ahead with prevention. CSIRO has a long and proud history of delivering moon shots across any number of endeavours, and health is no different. As JFK said, ‘we choose to go to the moon not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard, because that goal will serve to organise and measure the very best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept and one that we are unwilling to postpone and one that we intend to win’. Australia is unwilling to postpone being the healthiest nation in the world. Australia has a great advantage in this moon shot because we recognise that health today means health across the whole system. At CSIRO it’s in our DNA, not just to deliver the national missions, but to deliver national benefit and improve the life of every single Australian. That’s the real moon shot, no-one left behind. Thank you.
[Applause]