The NHMRC has announced that the NHMRC Development Grants will now be an independent funding scheme, open for application twice a year and without the restrictions that normally apply to other NHMRC Grants.
Professor Alan Pettigrew, CEO of the NHMRC, pointed out that the move highlighted the NHMRC's commitment to implementing the Health and Medical Research Strategic Review (Wills Review) recommendations and to supporting research commercialisation.
"To maximise the return of public investment in research, the NHMRC has worked to refine the policy and process for awarding Development Grants, which aims at providing gap funding for early 'proof-of-concept" stage research that has commercial potential," he said.
"In recent years, the research community in Australia has shown increasing interest in the Development Grants, especially following NHMRC's intellectual property management and commercialisation awareness program, and a number of Government initiatives in innovation and research commercialisation, including Backing Australia's Ability."
Professor Warwick Anderson, Chair of the NHMRC's Research Committee, indicated that "These Grants are strongly supported and acknowledged as an important link between academic research and knowledge industries, but they need to be provided in a timely manner to keep pace with the reality of innovation".
The Industry Committee, a sub-Committee of the Research Committee, chaired by Professor Nic Nicola, manages the Development Grants. In the current application round, 46 applications were received - three times that of previous years.
"To facilitate research development and fit with the pace of commercialisation reality, the new Development Grants will be assessed in a timely manner by the Development Grants Assessment Panel," Professor Anderson said.
"The Industry Committee and the Development Grants Assessment Panel are currently working hard to assess all applications received in this round, and the Committee is expected to open the second round of applications in June this year."
In addition to the new Development Grants, the NHMRC has introduced other important measures to foster commercialisation. These include the release of NHMRC Interim Guidelines for Intellectual Property Management for Health and Medical Research and the National Principles of Intellectual Property Management for Publicly Funded Research with other key agencies.
The 2002 round of NHMRC Industry Fellowships, worth $80,000 a year over four years, will open for application in early May this year. New Support Enhancement Options (SEO) have also become available, to further strengthen the capacity of the Research Fellowships Scheme to translate outcomes into practice. Each SEO provides an additional $15,000 a year over and above the base Research Fellowship package.