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New Zealand Clinical Trials Portal launch

Hon Tony Ryall
Minister of Health


18 April 2013

New Zealand Clinical Trials Portal launch

Good Evening.

I’d like to acknowledge Innovation Hub Chair Dr Murray Horn, Deputy Chair Sir Ray Avery and other Hub members.

I’d also like to welcome Dr Frances Guyett to New Zealand and to her new role as the NZ Health Innovation Hub’s CEO. Along with recent board appointments - Dr Andrew Wong, Managing Director of Auckland’s MercyAscot private hospital, and Sue Suckling, current chair of Callaghan Innovation and fellow board member Keith Oliver, chairman of Medicine Mondiale Technologies - I believe the Hub will be well-placed to serve its purpose.

The Hub is a partnership between four of New Zealand’s biggest DHBs: Auckland, Canterbury, Counties Manukau and Waitemata. Established earlier this year, it will work to help grow New Zealand’s health technology industry and to support the adoption of innovations developed within the public health sector – welcome news.

The New Zealand Health Innovation Hub is unique because for the first time, it brings together the public health system and the entrepreneurial spirit of innovators and industry.

I’m very pleased to be here tonight to help launch the NZ Clinical Trials Portal. The portal has been delivered on time and within baselines – that’s two boxes that get the tick.

This initiative is positive and reflects some of the best value investment in the future that taxpayers’ resources can be focussed on. What makes it particularly positive is that it is one of many areas of investment being made in a health-related capacity.

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While many OECD countries have been reducing health spending, New Zealand had a 3.4 per cent increase in real health spend, the third highest of 27 nations. As a result, New Zealand has risen to having the fifth equal highest spend on health as a proportion of its GDP.

Health funding has to be put into the most effective areas that we can. That means definable, measurable initiatives that achieve results – and make a real difference to New Zealanders’ health.

Harry Potter fans will know what a portal is, but for the rest of us muggles, our experience of portals is limited. Wikipedia informs that a portal is a website that brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way.

The portal is a new way for both patients and clinicians to find out about medical and health research in New Zealand.

The portal also helps fulfil one of the recommendations from the Health Committee’s Inquiry into clinical trials from 2011, by promoting and co-ordinating clinical trial activity in New Zealand, as does the wider activity of the Health Innovation Hub.

I’ve looked at the portal and I’m impressed. It is a quick and easy way for the public, healthcare providers and industry partners to gather information about clinical trials online.

I understand the information has been pre-tested on participants, health providers, researchers and industry. I can confirm the information works for politicians too.

Clinical trials can often sound a little academic. But for some of us who have someone close to us affected by cancer or other serious diseases, clinical trials can be a vital source of hope.

Many of us will have heard about trials of new therapies that may be able to assist treating serious diseases, when other options don’t appear to have worked.

This portal helps connect kiwis with this research, in a very tangible way. One portal site search showed three clinical trials of new medicines for malignant melanoma.

The portal goes on to explain who is eligible for the trials and how to go about being recruited.

These three melanoma trials are part of the more than 500 trials currently recruiting New Zealanders.

Not all of the listed trials are new medicines in development. Trials can involve the testing of a range of health activities including diagnosis, surgery and medical devices. I’ve learnt that even toothpaste has been through a clinical trial.

Clinical trials can deliver benefits to patients; produce cost savings for tax payers; help us recruit and retain health professionals and attract international investment.

We know New Zealand is an attractive place for clinical trials. We have a first rate public health system; an outstanding clinical workforce, and many researchers recognised internationally as world leaders in their fields.

To mention just two of them: Professors Richard Beasley and Ed Gane.

Professor Beasley played an important role in the Merino Company winning the Medical Design Excellence Award in the United States for their range of merino wool compression garments designed and developed in New Zealand. Professor Beasley led the research team which tested the garments. In 2008 he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.

In 2011, Professor Gane was made a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for Services to Hepatology and Transplantation. He is an investigator for many international clinical trials of therapies for chronic HBV, HCV, and hepatocellular carcinoma including phase one studies of new molecular agents.

Having world class researchers is key to better research as well as helping improve our standard of living by building a more productive and competitive economy.

The Government believes that this requires a strong focus on science, innovation and research. The Prime Minister’s chief science advisor, Professor Sir Peter Gluckman, was appointed in 2009 to help bring this focus.

Budget 2012 contained $385 million over four years for new investment in research, science and innovation.

Building a strong economy requires us to get better at turning good ideas into profitable ones. The Government has supported establishing Callaghan Innovation with a focus on manufacturing, engineering and technology.

The other is the Health Innovation Hub, with its strong health focus, which is behind the portal launch today.

The Hub is a mobile, virtual organisation which will make the most of technology. Systems are in place and expert advisors available to support innovators and fast-track ideas with the potential to improve health outcomes.

I welcome the Hub’s work to strengthen partnerships between our healthcare sector, industry and research organisations to lead to better health outcomes.

People who work in health have great ideas – like the one we’re launching tonight. I’m told there is strong support for this portal because it will help clinicians, and overseas industry, connect with New Zealand clinical trial information - a one-stop-shop if you like.

I’d like to thank everyone here involved in the portal’s launch and the wider work of the Hub, for their commitment and hard work. This Government is committed to Better, Sooner, More Convenient Healthcare for all New Zealanders and innovation plays an important role in this.

I’d like to finish by referring to an anticancer ‘stealth’ drug invented here which was granted approval by the US Food and Drug Administration in September last year to move forward to clinical trials.

Called PR610, the drug holds promise for a particular type of lung cancer that is resistant to other chemotherapy medicines.

Medical researchers have described this as an exciting new therapy ushering in a new era of personalised medicine here. For the next phase of testing, patients will be screened for the genetic mutation that causes drug resistance and then enrolled in a trial of a New Zealand drug designed to target that mutation.

This is described as a first for New Zealand. I hope many others will follow. This portal is an important step down that path.

ends


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