Medical Research Future Fund Research Administration Officer Webinar – 29 August 2024

Misha Hutchings:

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for the fifth Medical Research Future Fund Research Administration Officer Webinar or RAO Webinar. I'd like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the lands that we're all joining from across Australia today. And I'd also like to pay respect to the elders past, present and those who are emerging, and to recognise the rich cultural practises that benefit all of us who get to call Australia home.

My name is Misha Hutchings. I'm the director of the Grants Management Office for the Medical Research Future Fund. This webinar today is one of an ongoing offering that the Department of Health and Aged Care holds twice a year.

The session today will cover some topics on recent and upcoming developments for the MRFF, and these will be presented to you by MRFF directors. Toward the end of the webinar, we will have a period for Q&A. So please begin sending through your questions now or as soon as you think of them during the presentation, using the space on the right-hand side of your screen, so that we can get to as many questions as possible once we reach that Q&A period. We'll begin now with the intent and purpose of these webinars.

The aim of these webinars is to provide practical information, in particular about administration of the MRFF, but also to assist potential grantees to better understand MRFF funding requirements. The MRFF also likes to seek feedback from RAOs from you with a view towards continuous improvement of MRFF grants administration, and really just to aid implementation of any changes that we plan to make as a result of the feedback that we've received from you. Our first speaker today is Pru Glasson, who is the director of the Translation and Commercialisation section in MRFF. So I'll hand over to her now.

Pru Glasson:

Thank you, Misha. Nice to be here and nice to present to everyone today. So I am today going to talk to you about the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative with the aim in assisting you in understanding the ways in which the MRFF supports commercialisation of health and medical research, and in particular how it supports industry and small, medium enterprises.

Under the third 10-year plan, the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative will provide $450 million over 10 years from 2024-25. The initiative seeks to help build a more mature, vibrant and thriving ecosystem that drives health and medical research and its translation into commercial outcomes and clinical practice, improving health, and generating jobs and economic growth. It seeks to grow the number of research outputs and improve Australia's performance in key commercialisation benchmarks, such as increasing the number of intellectual property applications, so that innovations can be capitalised and returns on investment are retained, as well as increasing the number of tangible products derived from research for patient benefits. And, generally, we see one role of the initiative is to de-risk technologies and businesses so that they are attractive for private investment.

Through the initiative, a large amount of funding is available to fund the most suitable organisation to identify and select a number of Australian small and medium enterprises, undertaking early-stage medical research and medical innovation projects that have commercial potential. So the grant opportunities delivered under this initiative will not fund organisations to progress their own early-stage research and medical innovation projects, and nor does it allow organisations to take an equity stake in the small, medium enterprises that are funded through the program.

We instead seek to fund a successful organisation that will work in partnership with small-to-medium enterprises to progress and nurture their medical research and medical innovation projects, providing access to capital and industry knowledge to support the transition of promising discoveries through the commercialisation pipeline. So, generally, the funded organisations through open and competitive processes are able to provide up to $5 million in funding over five years to those partnered small, medium enterprises. And this funding is allocated incrementally as project seek and then demonstrate proof of concept and transition towards implementation.

However, we do recognise that successful commercialisation requires more than just capital, and these organisations are expected to bring partners to the program that create an ecosystem of industry knowledge, mentorship and value add activities, such as market analysis and access advice, instruction on regulatory pathways and processes, and tangible asset reviews. So these programs are seeking to create successful companies, as well as successful ventures or projects with the know-how to go on and commercialise other projects perhaps not funded through the MRFF grant.

In some cases, this program has actually influenced university IP policy, including changes to those policies to allow the creation of spin outs who can then apply for and receive funding through this initiative.

Since 2017-2018, $345.3 million of MRFF funding has been allocated through this initiative across six grant opportunities, reflecting the model I discussed on the earlier slide where it's awarded to a single or multiple organisations who then run contestable and competitive processes underneath that to fund projects or small-to-medium enterprises. So through those grant opportunities, 144 small-to-medium enterprises or ventures to date have been funded. However, $100 million of that $345.3 million is only just beginning to roll out, and that's going to roll out through CUREator+ and CUREator+ Dementia and Cognitive Decline. You can see there in the green text on the slide the status of those programs.

This slide also demonstrates that sometimes these grant opportunities, while they generally have a commercialisation focus, that there may be specific disease targets, so dementia and cognitive decline, devices, drugs or digital health targets, or even research stages, such as pre-clinical and early clinical projects.

So stakeholders online, including universities who have projects with commercial potential, should consider the following MRFF funding options currently being delivered in partnership between Brandon BioCatalyst and ANDHealth through the CUREator+ program. So CUREator+ and CUREator+ Dementia and Cognitive Decline are programs delivered in partnership on behalf of the department.

CUREator+ will host a national webinar ahead of each funding round, and encourages prospective applicants to book a 30-minute one-to-one as well with the CUREator+ team to discuss their opportunity and whether or not they might be eligible to apply for funding. So we do strongly encourage utilisation of that service and that engagement with Brandon and ANDHealth. So if you do have or if you are interested in discussing an opportunity relating to drugs, devices, diagnostics, or general inquiries, they ask that you contact the CUREator team, info@cureator.com.au, and I can make these email addresses available after the webinar as well.

If you do, however, have digital and connect, sorry, opportunities related to digital and connected health innovations, we suggest those inquiries are directed towards the ANDHealth team, which is curatorplus@andhealth.com. We do, of course, also have the 2024 BioMedTech Incubator, which just closed in July. So that is an MRFF grant opportunity that is seeking to fund, is offering grants of up to $33 million, $99 million overall is available. We're seeking to fund organisations who will, again, deliver similar programs to the CUREator+ and the CUREator+ Dementia and Cognitive Decline.

Now, those successful organisations can specialise in their area of expertise. They do not need to cover and/or fund SMEs in the entire breadth of the biomedtech space. And so we do encourage you to watch out for the outcomes of that because those opportunities may become available to you in a particular area.

This slide is just seeking to give you a brief insight as to the sort of impact that these programs can have. So this slide is depicting one of the key outcomes of the recently concluded BioMedTech Horizons programs two, three, and four. This was delivered on behalf of the department by MTPConnect.

Awardees in the program have captured the interest of investors with public information indicating that more than $479 million in flow-on and external investment from $30.3 million in MRFF funding has been secured after receipt of this funding, and 79%, or 30 of 38 companies, have been successful in securing flow-on funding. And 92% of this has been secured from non-grant funds, such as seed, angel, private investments, or Series A, B, or C financing. So these programs do make a difference and we encourage you to investigate how you can engage and apply to these programs.

I will next hand over to Misha, I believe. Thank you.

Misha Hutchings:

Thank you, Pru. We'll now cover some developments related to managing an MRFF grant.

We did touch on this a little bit in the previous RAO webinar, but we do have some developments. We're happy to announce that we'll be releasing a media embargo policy jointly with the National Health and Medical Research Council, NHMRC, within the next two weeks or so, just to provide some clarity on the expectations of applicants during an embargo period.

A media embargo is, essentially, just a hold on speaking publicly about the outcome of a grant application until the official announcement has been made and the embargo has been lifted. During that period, you can speak internally about the outcomes, including, for example, to your family. And if a grant was awarded, you can actually begin preparations for the grant to start. If the start date occurs during the embargo period, you absolutely can begin spending some funds as long as you don't publicly release information that links to the MRFF, the grant or the grant opportunity. So, for example, in a job or recruitment advertisement, we just ask you to refrain from making those linkages.

What you cannot do is fairly straightforward. You and people in your organisation and, essentially, anyone who has been told about the outcome, can't provide that information or the outcome publicly, such as in social media, in a media release, at events, or other public outlets, media or forums. Upon release, the media embargo policy will be available both on the MRFF grants management resources webpage and the NHMRC website. And there will, of course, be further details within that policy than what I've shared with you today.

So now we'll just talk about the recently released revised project reporting templates. So the revisions include streamlining of some of the questions, for example, to introduce some yes and no options, and then we're just asking for more detail just depending on what the yes or no response is. That's just a way to really target where we're asking you to elaborate and provide more information. If things are going well, that's great. You can tell us as much as you like, but no obligation to go into great detail if everything is unfolding as you anticipated it in your grant application.

You'll also notice that the questions and space for responses have been formatted into tables. This has been done to help make it easier to digitise the information provided. So we just ask that you don't remove those tables and you enter your responses within them.

For those MRFF grants in NHMRC's system, we've removed the fields for reporting the period expenditure as we're now receiving that information through the separate financial year financial reports or annual statements which are due at the same time. In the next couple of weeks, along with the media embargo policy, we'll publish a guidance document to give you some advice for completing the progress reports and final reports. But in the meantime, we'll touch on a couple of tips for you, as the people who review the drafts, and then submit them on behalf of your researchers.

The first tip is just to ensure that the correct template is being used. There are separate templates for progress and final reports, and there is also a slight difference in a couple of the questions, depending on which grant hub is administering your MRFF grant. So just ensure that you have the correct template for whether it's during the grant period or after, and from the correct grant hub.

You should also make sure that all questions within the template have answers or responses and they've been answered correctly. So you'll see in this new template there are some drop-down selection boxes, mainly with yes, no questions, and we do need responses to all of those. The free text fields underneath them will be filled out in relation to what response has been provided from those drop-down selections. So making sure that those are ticked properly will also help ensure that your researchers aren't filling out things that they don't have to. Lastly, the reports should be submitted as Microsoft Word documents, not PDFs, and that will further help us with the data extraction.

In terms of the project expenditure section within the progress and final report templates, just make sure that the total budget is the amount that equals the total award outlined in the grant agreement or in the grant schedule, depending on which grant hub is administering your MRFF grant. The grant agreements do allow for grantees to move funds between budget categories or expenditure items where costs, for example, decrease for one approved expenditure and increase for another one.

So if you've done this, if you've moved funds around, that's natural, but the table in the project expenditure section of the reports is where you should just notify the department of the revised distribution and just give a simple explanation of what you've done. For example, ‘Costs have increased for this, but they've decreased for this other thing, and so we've moved the funds accordingly.’

I also just want to touch on a couple of other upcoming developments in the post-award space. So in terms of other forthcoming resources and activities, we've got quite a few things going. So the MRFF will be holding or continuing to hold our MRFF RAO Seminars. The ones in New South Wales and Victoria will happen within the next few months. These sessions are just really an opportunity for you to spend some time and meet with MRFF staff in person. We'd love to get out there and to meet and talk with all of you. And, really, it's for you to discuss topics that will help you to support your researchers, both to apply for MRFF grants, but as well as manage them and just understand the particular MRFF approach.

We're also very happy to announce that the department will be putting together an MRFF Day program this year to join the Research Administrators’ Seminar. That's typically held annually by the ARC and NHMRC in collaboration with ARMS. So look out for more detail soon.

And then lastly, the MRFF will be consulting RAOs soon to review the MRFF Grant Variation Policy, which was launched in 2022, so it's been a couple of years now. And we’d just like to get some feedback on areas for revision and improvement from you who have to use that policy and employ that policy with your MRFF grants. So also look out for communications about that in the coming weeks. I will now hand over to Cindy Thamrin, who is the director of the Performance and Evaluation Section in the MRFF.

Cindy Thamrin:

Thank you very much, Misha. And hi everybody, it's a pleasure to be able to talk to you today about the evaluation space and the impact measurement space. So there are two main things that I want to talk to you about today. One is about an update to our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Strategy, which you may or may not be familiar with. And the second is providing you with an update on our performance indicators survey, which you would've heard about as well through our various communication channels.

So on the first point, so many of you may have come across the Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Strategy before. This was first introduced in 2020, and provides a framework by which the MRFF and the research that is funded by the MRFF is evaluated. And the main reason for talking to you today is because we have just updated the document. It was due for a refresh in this financial year.

And so now you'll find that the updated document is now published and available on our website. I would like to take you through what are some of the changes in this document and what that might actually mean for you, as well as the researchers that you support.

While some of you may or may not be familiar with the strategy, many of you may be familiar with this figure that is contained within the strategy, and more importantly, the framework that outlines what are the MRFF's impact measures and Measures of Success. The reason why you might be familiar with these, and you might be as articulated in this figure, is because when your researchers apply for MRFF grants, they would have had to answer a statement with regards to how their projects answer or address the MRFF Measures of Success, and by that route, the MRFF impact measures as well.

Similarly, when your researchers submit their progress and final reports, they would have also had to answer to how their project has tracked against progress towards these measures of success and impact measures. So you'll see on the screen what we've done in this update in August 2024 is we have made slight changes to the wording of one of the impact measures and three of the measures of success. And these are made in response to extensive stakeholder feedback and from researchers in our advisory committees in order to be more inclusive of public and preventive health so that the MRFF's focus is not just on changes to health care, but also how health policy might be affected and influenced and changed as well.

You can see in the diagram these are the updated measures. The five impact measures that outlined in the blue boxes at the top, and these now represent better health outcomes, economic growth, increased job and export potential, and increased health efficiency as per before. Whereas previously we had beneficial change to health practice, this has now been updated to beneficial change to health policy and practice.

Similarly, with the measures of success, you can see the number of measures of success remain the same. There's still eight of them, which are increased focus of research on areas of unmet need, more Australians being able to access clinical trials, new health technologies, and the next one, new health interventions, are embedded in health policy and practice. Previously, as I alluded to before, these only spoke to health practice, but now we are in allowing for changes to health policy as well.

Other measures of success include research community having greater capacity and capability to undertake translational research, as per the remit of the MRFF, and that health professionals adopt best practises faster. We've made one more change to the community engages with and adopts new technologies, treatments measure of success and added interventions to that to recognise that not all topics of MRFF research deals with technologies or drugs, but also other forms of interventions, including public health interventions. And finally, the last measures of success has remained the same, and that has increased commercialisation of health research outcomes.

You'll notice we've tried to keep the wording as similar as possible so as not to shift the goal posts for projects that are in train and are already tracking along these measures of success by design. So the next slide just, I guess, outlines the changes that I have mentioned, adding the words policy, in addition to health practice, as well as adding interventions to one of the measures of success.

Another thing that we have updated with the new monitoring and evaluation strategy is incorporation of the performance indicators, which we published back in March 2023. In that document, if you're not aware of it, that is a document in which we outline some of the ways or the primary ways in which we hope to track progress against the measures of success by breaking it down into lower-level indicators that we can capture quantitative, as well as qualitative, data on those are outlined in the outputs, in this logic diagram that you would have seen in that document. And that figure is now, that logic diagram is now also incorporated in the new monitoring and evaluation strategy, as well as the details regarding these indicators, which essentially represent project outputs that the MRFF now hopes to capture on a per-project basis as well as an aggregated form to enable us to report on the outcomes and impact measures of the MRFF.

And these outputs, as you could see on the logic diagram, encompass a number of things, including whether the MRFF is supporting priority populations or emerging issues through the projects that it funds. Some details regarding the type of clinical trials that we support, some research workforce indicators, indicators surrounding knowledge gains such as publications and citations, and we also have indicators surrounding consumer involvement. And those that provide us with some idea of how far along the project is progressing towards healthcare change and health practice change, commercialisation pathway indicators. And finally, also, we also hope to capture case studies in which measures of success or impact measures may be particularly well met. You can find out more details about these in the updated monitoring and evaluation strategy document online.

I've talked about the two major changes. There are other minor changes within the monitoring and evaluation strategy, which may be of interest to you. We now better articulate what our performance monitoring data sources might be and how we hope to capture some of these data. Both from the data that researchers and you, RAOs, have already provided us, as well as other means of capturing this data elsewhere both automatically, as well as occasionally via something like the performance indicator survey, which I'll talk about in more detail later, and you would've heard about already.

Other things include adding to the strategy document details or links to evaluation activities for the MRFF that have been recently completed or completed and over the last a few years. And so it's a handy resource if you wish to find out more or refer to evaluation activities that have been performed in the past. And there are also other minor editorial changes, including to accommodate the new 10-year plan that is in place for the MRFF and other changes in general.

So, why should researchers care about these changes? What does it mean for them? As I alluded to earlier before, understanding how the MRFF intends to track impact and measures of success would help researchers strategise their own research impact, both in terms of their grant proposals, as well as in their progress and final reporting. But also for their research more generally, and it invites them to consider their own research impact in a broader context.

As I mentioned before, the new changes to the measures of success and the impact measures, hopefully, will allow public and preventive health researchers to better able to articulate the impact of their own research without being tied down to how it might impact healthcare. We also hope that researchers can contribute to this process by engaging in evaluation activities and understanding what those evaluation activities are so that they can see how these are being evaluated and also how then they translate to better support, better policy and program development.

And so this is the way in which researchers can engage in that process and contribute to better policy development and program development. Finally, it's about transparency of the data that we collect for evaluation and other purposes, and to provide this research sector with the outcomes of these evaluation activities, whether positive or negative.

I mentioned before about the performance indicator survey. This is going to be one of our main methods of data capture going forwards. The first survey went out in March 2024 and closed about a month later. And as I mentioned, this is one of the key methods of data capture to enable us to track research impact over time. It isn't the only one, and we do intend to make use of other forms of data, including data that is already provided to us. Nevertheless, we recognise the survey is an undertaking, a significant undertaking, and so we do thank all research administration officers for your assistance in ensuring that grantees were aware and completed the survey.

We also have heard a lot of feedback from research officers about how the survey could be better improved in the future, and we continue to be happy to receive this feedback for surveys that we will conduct in future. But you'll be pleased to see, thanks to your efforts and your researchers’ efforts, we were really pleased with the response rate for the survey. And so we had a 75.5% response rate out of 1,328 grantees who were invited to participate in the survey. And this was really pleasing to see because it really means that we can summarise data in a way that provides us with reassurance that this is a good representation of the majority of MRFF grants.

I've provided here some basic summary statistics to enable you to see also what this response rate looks like broken down by, say, state and territory. Overall, we saw really good engagement across the states and territories and the makeup of the responses broken down by organisation and themes and completion agrees with the broader general characteristics of the grants that we fund in general.

You'll see that the majority of the respondents came from the university sector, unsurprisingly, with 86.1%, with a smaller proportions ascribed to medical research institutes and corporations. There is a division of, according to MRFF themes, MRFF themes, which is in agreement with the broader population, again suggesting that the responses that we get and hopefully the outcomes that we'll see are a good representation of the MRFF as a whole. And you may be interested to see that around 14% of the projects that were surveyed or that returned a survey have completed at this stage of the MRFF.

The team is still undergoing conducting analyses. So we hope to be able to provide the sector with the outcomes of the survey in due course and, hopefully, with some interesting insights that will help inform not just the impact of the MRFF, but how we might improve programs going forward. So I am going to hand back over to Misha for Q&A. Thank you.

Misha Hutchings:

Thank you, Cindy, and also thank you to Pru, both of you for your informative presentations. We'll now move on to the Q&A portion of the webinar.

As I mentioned before, we are triaging questions as they come through, so please just keep them coming in. It also allows us to see if we can gather information if we don't have it on hand between the three of us. As we may not be the appropriate directors online today to respond to some of the questions, any that we don't respond to, we'll take those away and take them on notice, and they'll be published on the website with our responses sometime in the future.

Alright, I'll start off by responding to the first question. The first question is, ‘Will the new MRFF media embargo policy cover the MRFF grants administered by the DISR, or the Department for Industry Science and Resources?’ So the Business Grants Hub is the administrator of some of our MRFF grants, and that hub is located within DISR. So, yes, that media embargo policy will cover all MRFF grants, regardless of the grant administration hub.

The second question relates to media embargoes and partners. So I'll hand over to Pru Glasson to read that question and provide a response.

Pru Glasson:

Thanks, Misha. So the question on embargo was whether or not researchers can communicate with external partners regarding contract matters. And the answer is communicating with your collaborators and partners on the grant is definitely okay. It's just that the embargo conditions flow through to those collaborators and partners, who you communicate that outcome to.

Misha Hutchings:

Thank you, Pru. Next question, ‘How do we access the correct report template for NHMRC administered MRFF grants? We've tried to submit a report in Sapphire. If an online form is used, please send a link.’

So the MRFF progress report templates are in a Microsoft Word format for all MRFF grants. Those templates are available both on the MRFF grants management resources webpage on the Department of Health and Aged Care website, as well as on the NHMRC website in the area marked for MRFF grants. So please do use those Microsoft Word templates, and the submission requirements should be outlined either on the grant hub's website, or within the grant agreement.

The next question I might hand over to Cindy for one on the measures of success.

Cindy Thamrin:

Thank you, Misha. I think there's a question regarding whether there will be a similar mode of collecting data from research partners like not-for-profit organisations or peak bodies. I am going to assume this is in relation to the performance indicators data and the measures of success data that was being presented.

Essentially, I should clarify, even though the majority of the data came from universities and MRIs and corporations, the data was being requested of all organisations that were MRFF grantees, regardless of the types of organisations. The three that I've mentioned just represent the largest proportions that were part of the response. And so, yes, this is being collected from other orgs as well. I hope that answers your question. If I've misinterpreted, please feel free to rephrase or ask it again.

Misha Hutchings:

Thank you, Cindy. I think we'll now go to a question on the PSPs. And I think Pru will respond to that one.

Pru Glasson:

Thanks, Misha. So this question is just regarding personnel support packages and the quantum applied to each of those PSPs, and whether or not there's any discussions or consideration to increase that.

As you would all be aware, we deliver the MRFF grant opportunities through two grants hubs, Business Grants Hub and the NHMRC. Each of those grants hubs operates under their own separate policies and processes. So those sorts of discussions are a matter for the grants hub, but we will certainly pass that feedback on to them.

Misha Hutchings:

Thank you, Pru. We have another question on the measures of success and whether or not they'll be updated by addendums.

Cindy Thamrin:

Thanks very much. And just to articulate the question, ‘Will the revised measures of success be updated by addendum for currently opened grant opportunities?’ And thanks for the question. The answer to that is that's not currently planned at the moment, but the best advice that you can provide your researchers is that they should answer to the monitoring and evaluation strategy and measures of success that are in place at the time of application. If there's changes, we will be sure to let you know, but at present the new measures of success should apply for newly opened grant opportunities.

Misha Hutchings:

There is a question, ‘Where will the MRFF visit in Melbourne later this year be based?’ I think it's where will the seminar be held. So we have been looking at holding all or part of the RAO Seminars in the Department of Health and Aged Care offices in each state. We do have quite a number of grantees based in Victoria, so we are looking at potential alternate venues, but they would all be in close proximity to the Department of Health and Aged Care offices in Melbourne. There has been a question around our MRFF grants list that's posted on the website, and Cindy has offered to respond to that one.

Cindy Thamrin:

Thanks, Misha. The question is whether an extra column could be added to the Excel document that is essentially the public list of MRFF grant recipients, and specifically whether the date of announcement can be included as it can be a difficult document to navigate to find the most recent updates without that date.

Thank you for that feedback. We do review from time to time how we can improve the information that we release to the public, so we'll definitely take that feedback on notice and take it into account. Thank you.

Misha Hutchings:

Thanks, Cindy. Alright, we have a question around hearing about the surveys and how do the announcement of surveys get sent out. So not sure if you were referring to the survey on the update of indicators, or if it's about the review of the MRFF Grant Variation Policy. But regardless, we typically send announcements out through the MRFF newsletter, which you can sign up to by the Department of Health and Aged Care website, but then our grant hubs will also send out information via their channels and the email lists that they have for the MRFF grantees. So, hopefully, that covers it for you.

So there is a question about the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative and the Frontier Health and Medical Research Initiative. We'll let Pru Glasson respond to that one.

Pru Glasson:

Thanks, Misha. So just to reiterate the question, the question was, ‘Can you clarify how the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative and the MRFF Frontier Health and Medical Research Initiative differ, please?’

The initiatives overall do have different objectives. The Frontier Health and Medical Research Initiative is seeking novel and meaningful solutions to intractable health issues. So there is a specific target there. Those grant opportunities are also open to anyone who is eligible to apply to MRFF grant funding, as opposed to the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative, which specifically targets small-to-medium enterprises.

We also, through the Medical Research Commercialisation Initiative, fund that single organisation who then goes on to run their own competitive processes to identify the SMEs funded underneath it. And within that, they also provide that whole ecosystem of commercialisation know-how and mentorship that we talked about on the earlier slides.

Frontiers is your more traditional grant model, in that the capital is being supplied directly to the grantee to progress the research. It doesn't come with that sort of ecosystem building initiative around it, and it is more targeted towards that specific research. I believe Frontiers is also stage gated. It can award a larger quantum of funding overall, I think up to $25 million. I am not the specialist for Frontiers.

But, yes, I think the biggest things are to whom the funding is targeted at and what the funding is targeted at. So Medical Research Commercialisation is generally any project with commercial potential and Frontiers is pushing at that novel solution to intractable health issues. Thanks, Misha.

Misha Hutchings:

Alright, so I'll take this next question, ‘Regarding provision of letters of support for grant applications, if the administering organisation or any participating institutions are providing cash or in-kind.’ Sorry, my question keeps jumping around. ‘Could you please clarify whether letters of support from these organisations can be provided?’ So great question, it's one we're happy to keep responding to, and we did respond to this question in the previous seminar.

But, essentially, letters of support are a way for collaborators to demonstrate their commitment to supporting the research or the project that's being implemented. A little bit of confusion has arisen because we've got different wording across the grant opportunity guidelines used by our two grant hubs. But the intent is really the same, that we recognise that collaborators play a very important role in the implementation of MRFF-funded projects. The letters of support are the way to demonstrate that.

But if we think about it from the assessor's point of view, we really want those letters of support to be the place where you outline contributions that are integral to the implementation of the research. So, for example, there are in-kind contributions made by community-based organisations or other collaborators on the ground that are integral to the implementation of the project.

For traditional research institutions, there are types of in-kind contributions that are expected. And while they're important, they don't necessarily need to be outlined in a letter of support. And this has been clarified within the grant opportunity guidelines. So, for example, the in-kind FTE of CIs is not necessary to be provided in a letter of support if that's the only contribution. Cash contributions, of course, where they are integral to the implementation of that project, those should be reported in a letter of support.

The terminology for Participating Institutions and MRFF-Eligible Organisations is particular to MRFF grants administered by the NHMRC. Hence, I was generalising my response there, but the principles apply regardless of the grant hub that's administering the grant opportunity.

So we do have a question around reviewer feedback. Cindy or Pru, if you'd like to just give a quick update on that in response to that question, that would be great.

Pru Glasson:

Sure. I'm happy to take that one, Misha. So the question is, ‘Applicants would like to receive review of feedback or comments on their grants, and MRFF have indicated that they were working on implementing this in the past. What are the updates?’

So, yes, that work is very much in train, and actually some of the recently run and awarded grant opportunities through both NHMRC and BGH piloted providing qualitative feedback, along with the standard quantitative feedback through scores that is normally provided to the applicants in this space. So you should start to see it roll more broadly out after these pilot grant opportunities have concluded.

Misha Hutchings:

Alright, the next question is around encouraging research partners, and I believe Cindy will respond to this one.

Cindy Thamrin:

Thanks, Misha. I just want to make sure I've got the right question, so bear with me a second. So I think I believe the question is perhaps a follow-up to the previous question, which is whether there are any intentions to encourage research partners like not-for-profit organisations to contribute to the reporting on their role in the research project. Reporting on consumer and community engagement from the consumers themselves would increase accountability of researchers in involving consumers and communities.

Thank you for that feedback, and I think it's an important point. The current methods by which we capture data collection with regards to specific grants don't currently include checking up with research partners in our evaluation processes. We do ask researchers to provide more details about their level of consumer and community engagement, or the activities that they are participating in order to the  activities in which these consumer and community participants engage in.

There are other channels in which we try and capture this information via evaluation activities. Our stakeholder consultations do include conversations with not-for-profits and consumer and community engagement to get a better sense of how well and meaningful researcher's engagement with consumers are. But I think the idea of incorporating this into our reporting is something we'll take into account. Thank you.

Misha Hutchings:

Alright. There was a tricky question. It's actually not a tricky question, but one that does come up a lot about the difference between a participating institution and a partner organisation. I'll provide a little bit of information on that, but we do cover that topic in our RAO Seminars. So if you haven't attended one of those, or did attend one in the past, it'll be available through the presentation slides from those, as well as in the discussion.

So participating institution is a term used in particular by our grant hub NHMRC, while partner organisation is used across both grant hubs. So in terms of participating institution in NHMRC's system, it really, the system allows for clarification of the percentage of effort that each organisation or institution is putting into a research project. Partner organisation in that context is thought of as an organisation that is helping to support the project to move forward but is not part of that core team that is implementing the research. Partner organisation in the BGH or DISR context is a broad term used for all organisations that are supporting the project to go forward or implementing it that are not the lead organisation.

More details around that are within the grant opportunity guidelines, but your grant hubs can also assist if there are some nuances that aren't covered off by that particular response.

I don't seem to have any other questions coming in. I'll just move to closing. So as we mentioned, we do like to hear from you to help assist with making improvements to the MRFF. There are a number of ways that you can keep apprised of any updates and the latest that's happening with the MRFF, including the opening of grant opportunities and any other updates that we make. So subscribing to the MRFF newsletter is one of those ways. You can also find information on the Department of Health and Aged Care website.

If you have questions in relation to a currently open grant opportunity, please do get in touch with our fantastic grant administration hubs, BGH and NHMRC. Email addresses are available there on the screen in the red box.

And then for those who are administering MRFF grants currently, we do have resources available, including the Microsoft Word templates for the progress reports and final reports available on the Department of Health and Aged Care website at the link provided there, as well as for download from NHMRC's website in the MRFF areas.

Lastly, you can also receive information from GrantConnect. That is the Australian government's website for all information related to Commonwealth grant opportunities, and you can receive notifications specifically about MRFF grant opportunities as information is published there.

We'd like to thank you for joining us today. This session has been recorded and will be available on the Department of Health and Aged Care website in the future. And as mentioned, we'll also provide responses to questions that we answered as well as those that we couldn't get to in the future. And those will also be available on the Department of Health and Aged Care website. Thank you and we hope you have a good afternoon.