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Real net spending per person fell 3.8 per cent in 2023–24, 4.8 per cent in 2024–25 and an estimated 5.2 per cent in 2025–26. The fall is accelerating. Based on population and inflation alone, this creates a funding shortfall of about $1.9 billion a year, or almost $8 billion by the end of this decade.

How will the Government and institutions respond? Instinctively, they will probably want to shut it down. Practically, that seems unlikely. The one certainty is that any concession to its realities will be reluctant and take time.

In 2026, it is approaching one dollar in every four, or 25 per cent of the market. That is not the over 100 million PBS prescriptions that attract no subsidy. It is the private market that exists outside the PBS framework.

Should industry groups present the agreement negotiations to patient groups and 'invited' stakeholders, and if so, what should they say? Why the private market for GLP-1 medicines could be a historic catalyst for the changes so many want.

US PhRMA, the country's equivalent of Medicines Australia, has taken the Trump administration to court over a Medicare rule that ties what the United States pays for some medicines to the prices paid in 19 other wealthy countries, including Australia.

As the review process approaches its end, like a drunk stumbling home from a big night out, a dynamic, people-focused private market has emerged for GLP-1 medicines for weight loss. Australians have responded.

Intelligence firm Nostradata, which collects data from more than 90 per cent of Australian community pharmacies, reports that about 1.6 million people have accessed a GLP-1 medicine privately in the past 12 months, creating a market with a value of around $2.3 billion a year and growing.

Australia's peak body for the biotechnology sector has used its 40th anniversary to warn that Australia's attractiveness as a base for the sector is not permanent, as rival nations sharpen incentives and compete harder for the industry.

Signatories include AusBiotech, Medicines Australia, the Medical Technology Association of Australia, the Australian Academy of Science, Research Australia and Science and Technology Australia.

Moderna and Australia's national science agency CSIRO have struck a five-year research collaboration to strengthen the nation's biosecurity capability and pandemic preparedness, with a potential human vaccine against Hendra virus selected as the first project under the new partnership.

An Australian company has taken one of the country's top design honours for a machine built to solve one of healthcare's most stubborn cleaning problems.

Seven leading Chinese medical societies have jointly published an expert consensus naming Technegas the preferred ventilation agent for lung imaging in pulmonary embolism, handing the Sydney radiopharmaceutical company Cyclopharm an endorsement that mirrors the position clinical leaders in the United States, Europe, Australia and New Zealand reached.