Canberra details tax changes with limited concessions for some innovators

According to the document released in response to a Freedom of Information request, the firm held 24 active contracts with the department, worth a combined $37.3 million as at 22 May 2026.

As health spokesperson, Stephenson has been a visible advocate for ACT's 'Closing the Medicines Gap' policy, released in July, that commits the party to a significant increase in Pharmac funding.

Australians living with a rare genetic form of motor neurone disease will gain access to an innovative treatment from 1 October, with the reimbursement of Biogen's QALSODY (tofersen).

This week, we mark a significant anniversary, discuss the risks of missing the opportunity that artificial intelligence offers to speed access to healthcare, and explore why some might be reluctant to embrace it. The wonderful irony of the phrase of the week.

The United States is marking an important legislative milestone that unlocked university-led innovation, while some in Australia still maintain that the government deserves pricing consideration for commercialised products that may have received some funding support in the distant past.

In a further expansion of pharmacists' role, the government announced a new care trial that will let participating pharmacists treat ear infections, provide wound care, and help manage chronic conditions including hypertension and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

Why does a submission drafted with AI assistance, assessed by an evaluator using AI assistance, and discussed by committee members who each turned to different tools to prepare, still have to land on the same calendar date it always did?

Two accounts of how the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee weighs patient and clinician voices arrived within weeks of each other, and they do not sit comfortably together.

After twelve years steering the Private Cancer Physicians of Australia through some of the most consequential fights in Australian cancer policy, Christopher Steer has handed the presidency to Cameron McLaren.

A Sydney company has become the first in Australia to earn a manufacturing licence for viral vectors, a milestone it says strengthens the nation's capacity to make advanced gene and cell therapies at home rather than relying on overseas suppliers.

We live in a wealthy country where this situation has been allowed to persist. Responsibility is not shared equally. Those with the authority to design, operate and change the system carry a greater obligation than the rest of us.

Among the patient advocates, parliamentarians and pharmaceutical executives who gathered in Canberra on Tuesday for the fifth annual Patient and Parliament Summit, organised by Bristol Myers Squibb, no politician delivered the sharpest verdict on the state of Australia's medicines system. It was a journalist.

Our AI Health Summit is two months away. Normally, that would feel close. Yet in the world of artificial intelligence, it increasingly feels like a planning horizon.

Australia's national powerchair football team, the Poweroos, is heading to Buenos Aires this October with Biogen in its corner. 

A plan built around expanding the traditional evaluator pipeline, without first testing what AI can absorb, risks locking in permanent headcount and cost against a workload that may shrink or radically change.

The Summit, supported by Bristol Myers Squibb, approaches a potential flashpoint, as a new survey reveals growing frustration among patient groups.

More than a quarter of a million Australians are still carrying the physical and emotional weight of a rare or less common cancer, some of them two decades after their diagnosis, according to a new report from Rare Cancers Australia.

The Secretary could vary the definition of 'common characteristics', use their new powers to establish a biological group, and Parliament would have no review rights. Yet the inquiry into this significant expansion of power did not hear directly from the industry.