Stories of Australian Science and Stories of Australia-Indonesia Innovation 2016
Bio Farma was established in 1890 and is a state-owned business that provides all the vaccines on Indonesia’s immunisation schedule. That’s 1.7 billion doses a year.
Bio Farma is also a major supplier to UN agencies and global health initiatives, producing, for example, 1.4 billion doses of polio vaccines of which about 20 million doses are for Indonesian use.
The company is based in Bandung about 100 km east of Jakarta.
Better vaccines are needed for the global fight against tuberculosis (TB) with nine million new cases annually. Indonesia had more than 320,000 reported cases in 2014, while Australia’s reported cases were just over 1,000. But the rise of drug-resistant TB poses a threat to all countries.
Two proteins from the tuberculosis bacterium have shown promising results in investigations for a new vaccine in mice. Scientists from Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) in Yogyakarta, with colleagues from the Centenary Institute and the University of Sydney in Australia, have found that the injected proteins can prime the immune system to induce protection against TB in mice.
Hearing-impaired children in East Java will have better access to services thanks to a collaboration between the University of Western Australia (UWA) and Universitas Airlangga. They’re working on audiology education and research with a long-term goal of establishing a Master of Clinical Audiology—Indonesia’s first audiology education program.
In 2014, residents of Yogyakarta started growing and releasing mosquitoes. It’s counter-intuitive, but the mosquitoes carry Wolbachia bacteria, which reduces the risk of them spreading dengue fever.
Over a number of weeks, mosquitoes with Wolbachia breed with local mosquitoes and pass the bacteria on to their offspring until almost all mosquitoes in the area carry the disease-blocking microbes.
A broad-spectrum flu vaccine is being developed to give better immunity to seasonal influenza strains and increased protection against future influenza pandemics.
The technology was created by researchers at the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide, who set up Gamma Vaccines to commercialise their ideas.
In 2013, Gamma Vaccines signed a three-way development agreement with Bio Farma and SOHO Industri Pharmasi to develop, manufacture, trial, and distribute the vaccine in Indonesia and other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries.
These are just some of the areas in which Indonesian and Australian researchers are innovating for better health in our two nations.
Read on for more about these and other health innovations.
Before the rotavirus vaccine was introduced in Australia in 2007, rotavirus caused about 10,000 hospitalisations among children under five years of age each year.
Globally, rotavirus is the leading cause of diarrhoea-related hospitalisations and deaths among young children.
Dr Muireann Irish discovered which parts of our brain are essential to imagine the future, ranging from simple things like “I must remember my keys and my wallet” to imagining complex events such as “my next holiday”.
And she’s shown that people with dementia don’t just lose the ability to remember the past, they also lose the ability to envisage the future.
While working at Neuroscience Research Australia and the University of New South Wales, Muireann has demonstrated that patients with dementia are unable to imagine future events or to engage in future-oriented forms of memory, and she has revealed the key brain regions that support these complex functions.
How can a doctor in a small practice with only one or two GPs learn from the mistakes of doctors across the country?
In any small practice, there’s a risk that an error can be interpreted as a one-off event, as there is limited awareness that the same incident could be occurring in other practices.
The Monash scientists who led the creation of the world’s first 3D-printed jet engine in 2015 are now improving the design and cost of manufacturing medical implants, surgical tools, aerospace components, and more.
They’ve been working with surgeons to design tools for specific operations, to replace ‘one-size-fits-all’ tools currently available.
Continue reading From jet engines to personalised surgical tools
