Australia’s medical researchers have been handed a blunt new brief to simply do more with less. The newly published 10-year National Health and Medical Research Strategy from the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing names a problem the industry has experienced for years:
Too many teams are working in silos, each rebuilding the same capability and footing the same duplicated costs.
As budgets tighten, that recognition is turning into action, and more researchers are deciding that not every part of a study needs to be built in-house.
The funding squeeze is being felt across the sector. Success rates for the National Health and Medical Research Council’s Ideas Grants scheme have dropped below 10 per cent, with close to 92 per cent of applications knocked back, compared with about 20 per cent a decade ago.
In Victoria, an independent analysis commissioned by the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes found 9 of the state’s 14 independent medical research institutes will be financially unviable by 2028–29 without urgent government investment.
The problem runs deeper than winning grants. Competitive funding has rarely covered the full cost of medical research, and this gap has been evident for many years. In 2023, institutes had to find an extra $786 million to cover the difference between grant income and what the research actually cost.
Those indirect costs, staffing, administration, infrastructure, equipment and institutional overheads, fall on the institutions regardless of the science. More researchers are now rethinking how they approach their work.
“Funding pressure is encouraging a healthy conversation about how research is structured,” said John Cardinal. “Rather than duplicating large scientific teams across every institution, researchers are now partnering with external experts for specialised work.”
This is the same duplication that the National Health and Medical Research Strategy points to: institutions across the country each maintaining their own version of the same specialised capability, at a time when budgets are under pressure to stretch further. How individual research groups respond to that will vary, but the conversation about which parts of a study need to sit within a single institution, and which don’t, is becoming more common across the sector.
The 2026–27 Federal Budget saw a commitment to lifting Medical Research Future Fund disbursements from $650 million towards $1 billion a year by 2030–31, though the sector warns the relief is years away, and the immediate pressure has not eased.
Whether that shift plays out through formal partnerships, shared infrastructure, or something else, the pressure behind it isn’t going away. It also comes at a cost to researchers’ own time, time that can otherwise disappear into the three months a year some spend writing grant applications with ever-slimmer odds of success.
“When researchers get good data back quickly, they can publish sooner, and that work becomes the foundation for their next grant,” Cardinal said. “Doing more with less is about being honest about what your team does best, and bringing in specialists for the rest so the funding goes where it really counts.”
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