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Well science is really about everything to do all around us, I mean science helps explain
life, the Earth, where we fit into the cosmos, how living things operate and very much developments
in healthcare, being able to vaccinate against deadly diseases, being able to treat new diseases,
existing diseases, all of this is based on science.
My name is Peter Gray and I'm the Director of the Australian Institute of Bioengineering
and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at the University of Queensland.
In the AIBN we've got some of these new exciting developments in biotechnology where we can
now take any molecule in the human body based on proteins and make a large amount of that
as a human therapeutic and this class of therapy is called biologics.
So we're linking up with a company in the Netherlands called DSM Biologics who are moving
to Brisbane and we're going to work with them and work out how to get a cell to make this
small amount very sensitive, very high specificity material that we hope will do something like
target tumour cells in the body. So we're very keen to see top end science
translate into clinical, health, environmental outcomes, that are benefitting Queenslanders,
Australians and globally, people all around the world.
Well there have been a lot of developments and in Queensland there has been investment
by the government in new research infrastructure which is having a major impact in attracting
a lot of people to Brisbane. I'll give an example; I was in the University of NSW in
Sydney and moved to Brisbane to head up AIBN and now an institute of 450 people, an annual
turnover of $40M. Two out of three people have moved to Queensland to take up the jobs.
There's a critical mass of science in this city, it's like only a few other places around
the world where you get a city with over a million people with a really good concentration
of science: San Diego, Boston, similar, so it's an exciting time to be in Brisbane.