Cognitio

Australia’s R&D Tax Incentive is one of the most significant programs driving investment and innovation in the life sciences. But how does it really work in practice, and what do the latest transparency data tell us about the companies claiming it?In this episode of the ARCS Cognitio Podcast, host Tim Boyle brings you highlights from a recent ARCS webinar with experts from EY. Together they unpack:The first tranche of R&D Tax transparency data and what it means for biotech, medtech, and clinical research.How companies can structure their claims and avoid common pitfalls.Key differences between Australian-owned and foreign-owned R&D arrangements.What regulators are focusing on in their compliance reviews.Whether you’re part of a multinational pharma, a startup biotech, or a contract research organisation, this episode provides practical insights into maximising the benefit of the R&D Tax Incentive while staying compliant.Listen now to understand how the program can support your organisation—and where the risks lie.

Ethics approval is only the first hurdle for a clinical trial. Every site then needs its own research governance review, and that can cost patients precious time. In this Clinical Trials Day webinar, Angela Scheppokat, Manager Governance at the Royal Melbourne Hospital Office for Research, explains how Melbourne Health, Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and the Royal Women's Hospital built a mutual governance pathway so one review can serve all three sites.Angela takes us from the deed and the pilot through to the first study, a CAR T trial approved in four days, which helped secure Australia's first site activation. She then turns to artificial intelligence, outlining how her hospital defines its risk appetite, draws on national and Victorian guidance, and works with its Digital Health Committee to oversee AI in research.A practical listen for research governance offices, trial sponsors and anyone building a flexible, risk-responsive process across sites.

Australia occupies an unusual position in global pharmaceuticals. It is regarded as a leader in cost effectiveness assessment, and at the same time it depends on innovation funded largely elsewhere. What does that dual role mean for patient access and for the medicines that reach this market?In this episode of Cognitio, Tim Boyle presents a LifeSciences Australia Market Access Special Interest Group webinar featuring Ella O'Nuallain, a health economics and policy researcher now working at NSW Health, who interviewed ten senior leaders across government and the pharmaceutical sector for her London School of Economics dissertation.Her findings show clear agreement on some reforms, and a striking divergence on one question: whether Australia is still a tier one launch market. The discussion covers funding buckets, PBAC engagement, risk sharing agreements and where reform goes next.

Every year in England and Wales, coroners write around 450 reports naming actions that could prevent future deaths. Roughly one in five involves a medicine. They are public, they are searchable, and according to our guest, essentially no pharmaceutical company is using them for pharmacovigilance.Dr Georgia Richards is an epidemiologist at King's College London and the founder of the Preventable Deaths Tracker, the first platform to digitise coroners' reports and turn them into live, searchable data. She is Australian, trained at Oxford, and spent a period as a safety epidemiologist at AstraZeneca.In this episode she explains how the coronial system works, what the tracker has found about opioids, fentanyl patches and anaphylaxis, and why she considers this an underutilised safety data source.Content note for show notes: this episode discusses death investigations, including deaths by suicide and overdose, in a research and public health context.

Our sector speaks in technical language, and that language is precise, accurate and often impenetrable to the people it is meant to serve. In this episode of Cognitio, Tim Boyle hands the microphone to Jessamy Gee, founder and director of Think in Colour and Australia's first IFVP certified master visual practitioner.Jessamy works as a graphic recorder, translating complex discussion into a visual record while it is happening, across healthcare, security, agriculture and public consultation. She makes the case for why visuals change comprehension, memory and emotional connection, runs a short drawing exercise you can do while you listen, and explains how she captures emotionally charged lived experience without flattening it into a data point.Presented close to complete, as she delivered it.