National Health and Medical Research Council Grants Announced

The outcomes of $123.5 million worth of National Health and Medical Research Council grants have been announced.
The  National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) grants include:
New grants to support and develop health and medical researchers at the beginning of their careers
The NHMRC Postgraduate Scholarships were awarded to 69 health and medical graduates to support them to complete a PhD or Masters Degree.
“There are still many unanswered questions in health and medical research and diseases like dementia, cancer and diabetes need new, innovative ways of thinking and sustained research efforts across generations. “Finding solutions for these conditions, and many others, will require years and years of high quality research to make real progress so we need to ensure Australia has the capacity to continue our high quality research performance in the future,” NHMRC CEO Professor Warwick Anderson said.
The grants support students to conduct research across a wide range of conditions including breast cancer, cystic fibrosis, Crohn’s disease, ALS, antibiotic resistance and dementia.
New collaborative research grants
Two new grants supporting partnerships between researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom, and five grants that will see top Australian researchers partnering with health-based organisations and governments are set to get underway.
Worth a total of $3.7 million, these projects will seek to improve outcomes for patients and people with conditions such as schizophrenia, nicotine addiction and gout by using e-health solutions and other innovative techniques.
“The grants announced today bring together diverse collections of researchers, organisations and governments who all share the goal of finding ways to improve the lives of those who are battling disease or other health conditions, and helping healthy Australians stay healthy,” Professor Anderson said.
“Importantly, these projects are the result of our researchers working together with groups from the broader Australian community to help tackle issues that matter most to them. “The challenges facing Australians and our healthcare system are great, but I believe that the passion and intellect of our best minds in research are equal to the scale of the challenge.”
The grant outcomes announced today include two collaborative research grants jointly funded by the Australian Government through the National Health and Medical Research Council and the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The Australian component of the grants totals $1.3 million; and  five NHMRC Partnership Project grants totalling $2.4 million.
New research grants to help transform medical research ideas into commercial outcomes 
Worth $15.2 million, the 26 NHMRC Development Grants support the commercial development of a range of products, processes and procedures that if successfully developed, will result in improved health care, disease prevention or provide health cost savings.
They include an injectable filler to repair bones, a new sperm sorting device to reduce male infertility and improve IVF outcomes and a device to improve the quality of cancer imaging and treatment precision, amongst other ideas.
Professor Anderson said the grants were an important mechanism for encouraging the translation of research into health outcomes.
“Many of these grants are supported by leading Australian biotechnology companies which contribute intellectual property advice, salaries to support researchers, access to equipment and marketing expertise. “This collaboration is crucial to the translation of research and the creation of new industries in Australia,” he said.
$98 million to support large scale grants
Eleven grants worth an average of almost $9 million each support teams of high calibre researchers pursue broad, multi-disciplinary and collaborative research in some of the most complex areas of health and medical research.
Professor Anderson said the grants are the largest available from NHMRC and went towards long term studies conducted by world-leading researchers.
“These grants support research teams for five years and incorporate researchers from a wide range of disciplines. Many of the big questions in health and medical research are increasingly complex and require experts from a number of fields working together to find innovative solutions,” Professor Anderson said.
“For these issues, the future of medical research is not individuals working on components in isolation, but many brains working together to bounce ideas off one another and explore leads alongside one another,” he said.
The grants go towards health issues including malaria, ovarian cancer, melanoma and chronic kidney disease amongst others.
For  more information on all grants announced, go to http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/outcomes-funding-rounds