Wesley Research Institute 30th Anniversary Reception

Wesley Research Institute Board Chair, Mr Charlie Sartain and Members of the Board; CEO, Mr Andrew Barron and staff; Life Members; donors and supporters; distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen.

I begin by acknowledging the Original Custodians of the lands around Brisbane, the Turrbal and Jagera people, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging and to any First Nations people here this evening.

Graeme and I are delighted to welcome you all to Government House to celebrate the Wesley Research Institute’s 30 years of achievement and acknowledge the significant role the Institute has played in the history of medical research in our State.

Queensland’s first formal medical research facility, the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine, was founded in Townsville in 1910, but it was to be a further 35 years before the State government approved the next major development – the establishment of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in 1945.

That this happened at all was thanks, in no small part, to the outspoken advocacy of Sir Howard Florey, shortly before he became a Nobel laureate for his work on penicillin.

When a scientist of such international eminence publicly declared that Australia’s brain drain at the time was tantamount to “melting our ore and throwing away the gold while retaining the dross”, governments listened, and the resultant establishment of the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in 1945 put medical research on a sound footing for a generation.

By the 1990s, it was clear to a group of dedicated doctors in Brisbane that there was an opportunity to create a new institute focused on applied research that would improve patient care and quality of life. The result, on the eighth of December 1994, was the official opening of what is now our State’s second-oldest medical research institute – the Wesley Research Institute.

Within eight years of funding its very first research project in 1995, the Institute had supported no fewer than 50 such projects, and by the end of its first decade, its reputation was such that it was able to attract a ten million dollar grant from Chuck Feeney’s Atlantic Philanthropies.

This was followed in 2007 by the construction of a new, multi-million-dollar Clinical Trials Centre and Tissue Bank funded through the Queensland government’s Smart State Research Facilities fund.

Within two years of the opening of that facility, a total of a hundred research projects had been funded and a further grant from the Smart State fund had been received, this time for ten million dollars to construct the Health and Medical Research Centre.

The growth continued with a generous five-million-dollar donation from the Brazil Family Foundation in 2015 to support neurological research, and the launch of the innovative COVID-19 Rapid Response Research Centre in 2020.

Today, the exciting journey continues with impressive results coming from investments in research into rural mental health and auto-immune disorders such a coeliac disease.

Sir Howard Florey may have been pessimistic about the future of medical research in Australia 80 years ago, but I like to think that, today, as a practical, intensely hard-working scientist with a focus on getting things done, Florey would have felt right at home in the Wesley Research Institute and would very much approve of its commitment to making a real difference to the lives of the sick and vulnerable.

Congratulations to you all on 30 successful and inspiring years!