00:00What is your one piece of advice for Australians ahead of the next pandemic, and are we sufficiently prepared?
00:06Quite frankly, we can never be sufficiently prepared for any catastrophe, I believe.
00:11We can't keep our focus on it, and we don't have the money and the time span to do it.
00:17So, we are improving our capacity, I think.
00:20The new CDC will, I think, get the states working better together.
00:25The states did pretty well, and we did pretty well through the pandemic.
00:29And the Morrison government, for all its flaws, did shut down international air travel quickly,
00:34and did the right thing in the main early on.
00:37And it really depends on the public going along with what's asked of them.
00:43It sounds like the chaos in the US could have an impact on us here in Australia.
00:48Do you think that's likely to be the case?
00:50I don't think it will have a lot of effect on our preparedness, or what our governments will do,
00:56or what the institutions that are responsible will do.
01:00I think all the state labs and state governments performed really well,
01:04though it would have been better if we could have better coordination between them.
01:08It's very difficult in Australia to run a national clinical trial,
01:11because health, unlike the military, was decided at the time of federation.
01:18Health would be left with the states.
01:21Since your Nobel Prize winning discovery in 1973 of how the immune system recognises virus-ridden cells,
01:28we've seen great advances in immunotherapy.
01:31What do you see as the potential of this field into the future?
01:35Immunotherapy has taken over as a major earner for pharmaceutical companies,
01:41and as a major treatment option for medicos, particularly with chronic and autoimmune diseases.
01:47Immunotherapy with monoclonal antibodies has really revolutionised treatment of multiple sclerosis,
01:53some cancers, and rheumatoid arthritis, and there's much more to do.
01:59The T-cell immunotherapy initially didn't get very far,
02:03and then we had these immune checkpoint inhibitor monoclonal antibodies,
02:07which we used to wake up T-cells that had gone to sleep in cancers, and eliminate the cancers.
02:13And we're combining that now with various approaches,
02:17where we give individuals a vaccine made from their own cancer cells,
02:22give that to them, and then use the immune checkpoint drugs.
02:26And that, I think, has a lot of potential.
02:28There's great potential in this area, as there is in great potential in all areas of molecular medicine.
02:33How much do we still have to find out about the immune system?
02:36We've got so much information, and this is true across the biomedical research spectrum,
02:42but there's still a whole lot of things we don't know.
02:46The two great complex systems we have for dealing with the external environment
02:51are the brain and the nervous system, and all its attachments and organs,
02:55like the eyes and the ears, and all those sorts of things.
02:58The immune system is the other one that reacts to foreign invaders.
03:02It's totally different from the brain, and it doesn't have a central processing unit.
03:09It's a mobile system. The cells move around the body.
03:12They move in and out. We don't know where a lot of events are actually happening.
03:16We know the lymph nodes are very important.
03:18We don't even know how big it is at any one time, because there are a lot of cells off in various tissues.
03:23And we don't know how it counts.
03:26We have reasonably stable numbers of white blood cells in blood.
03:30We don't know how that works. Why? How does that work?
03:34So there are a lot of questions, a lot of conceptual—just as there are in neuroscience.
03:38I mean, the understanding of consciousness, for instance, which I always approach with great trepidation.
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