Meet the Solutionists, with Mark Scott

What if the cure everyone’s waiting for already exists — but patients can’t access it?

With AI transforming medicine, breakthroughs are no longer science fiction. They’re happening now. But innovation alone isn’t enough. So how do discoveries escape the lab to reach patients? 

Leading researchers Michael Bowen, Victoria Cogger and Chenyu Tim Wang share their medical moonshots in novel therapeutics and nanomedicines, and how they’re expediting the process from discovery to delivery.

Mark Scott  00:00

This podcast is recorded at the University of Sydney's Camperdown campus on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. They've been discovering and sharing knowledge here for 10s of 1000s of years. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Michael Bowen  00:29

We have invested tens of millions of dollars into research and development, and we have taken an interesting tool compound into phase two clinical trials for treating agitation and aggression in dementia. 

Mark Scott  00:42

That's Michael Bowen, the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Kinoxis Therapeutics. In the last few decades, massive strides in technology have catapulted us into a new era of medical treatments, from nano medicines to gene editing and brain imaging. And now artificial intelligence is super charging these advancements. But breakthroughs don't save lives unless they make it out of the lab. That's why researchers are taking medical moonshots: bold, high-risk pushes to tackle problems once thought impossible. Could this help us fast track cures for disease, especially as cancer, metabolic disease and climate-related health threats continue to rise? This is The Solutionists. I'm Mark Scott. This recording was done at a live public talks event presented by Sydney ideas, the University of Sydney's flagship public talks program. ABC Health and Science journalist Tegan Taylor explores these questions with Biomedical Research Leader Victoria Cogger, neuroimaging scientist and engineer, Chenyu Tim Wang, and neuroscientist and psychopharmacologist Michael Bowen. Here's Michael on how his research began.

Michael Bowen  02:16

My journey really goes back nearly 15 years actually. I was working in Professor Ian McGregor's lab at the time, and through a collaboration with some colleagues in the School of Chemistry, we discovered this really interesting small molecule that's now known as KNX100 that was able to increase preference for social interaction in pre-clinical models, and modulating social systems in the brain was something that we were really interested in. Anyway, we continued to work on this compound with what funding we could secure for several years, but it got to a point where it was clear that if we wanted it to be anything more than just a tool compound, something interesting for scientific examination, that it was going to need a vehicle outside of the usual NHMRC ARC funding avenues. At the end of 2014, I was fortunate enough to be awarded a National Health and Medical Research Council Fellowship, which essentially gave me five years to go all in on this and see if we could get this to a point where it could have a real shot at translating and having impact in the real world. We had a lot of ground to cover. We had no idea how this compound worked. We didn't know what therapeutic application was going to be best to take it forward in, we hadn't characterised the safety, the pharmacokinetics, all of these things. For several years it felt like pushing a giant boulder uphill, and then in 2016 we were able to get Uniseed, the university-backed venture fund on board as our cornerstone investor. Pretty rapidly after that, we secured a number of really important early investors, and we were able to found Konoxis Therapeutics. Now, since founding Konoxis Therapeutics seven years ago, to give you an idea of the rapid pace at which the program's developed, we have taken KNX100 from an interesting tool compound into phase two clinical trials, and we actually launched this month, our phase two clinical trial for treating agitation and aggression in dementia. This has been a huge team effort. We have over that period of time, we invested tens of millions of dollars into research and development, and we have had really important research collaborations and partnerships that have spanned 4 continents and 12 countries, so it's really a team sport. 

Tegan Taylor  04:25

So when did you know that this was the one to go all in on? How did you know what was going to happen in a human and what kind of humans to focus on? 

Michael Bowen  04:36

Yeah, you don't really, but you have to take a risk at some point. But I guess at that point I'd been working on it, I was working on a number of different compounds, a number of different systems, and there was something special about this compound, the way that it was working. I'm a big believer that good science is about trying as hard as you can to show that whatever you think is happening is not what's happening, and then giving it to other people and getting them to try and do the same. We spent years trying to do this, and we continue to try and do this, and every time we try and refute what we think is going on, it just gets better and better. 

Tegan Taylor  05:07

Vic, tell us your story. 

Victoria Cogger  05:09

So I came to developing nano medicines from quite a different angle. I work at Concord Hospital, which is, as many of you may know, an old Department of Veteran Affairs hospital. So we have a lot of older people at Concord. We see firsthand the people that take the drugs or the medications, which are the older people, but medications are not tested in older people. They're actually tested in young people., and then we try and treat the diseases of older people using treatments for young people. So there's this big disconnect in the way drugs are developed to treat the diseases of aging, and so we were observing all these adverse drug reactions that are incredibly debilitating to our older people. We started to ask ourselves, why are older people so adversely affected by the drugs that are actually meant to be helping them? So we started to play around. I'm a liver physiologist by training, and I started to look at the liver, and started to see some changes in the way that the liver operates with aging, which completely overturned the dogma. Everybody thought that because the liver can regenerate, it will just keep regenerating in perpetuity, and we wouldn't see aging in the liver. What we were able to show is there a lot of changes with aging in the liver. So, we wanted to understand why these changes were important and whether we could actually target these changes with medications, so that the medications we were using to treat the other diseases might actually be effective. Fast forward a long way, we were trying to understand that and target particular compartments or particular cell types in the liver, and that's how nano medicines came into our lives, because nano medicines allow us to tune the particular place the drug is actually delivered to. We started to work with insulin because the great thing about insulin is that it's a lifesaving therapy for people living with diabetes. You know that the insulin is in and it's working if blood sugar drops, it's almost like the perfect testing molecule. We started to play with insulin to see whether our nano medicines were delivering the cargo, the insulin, to where they needed to be to elicit the responses we wanted to see. And bingo, it worked perfectly. Unfortunately, the dots we developed initially were very toxic, so we had some work to do. We started to work and work. I work with a very clever geriatrician and toxicologist. He and I have worked on this project for 25 years we worked out the other day. We then brought in a very young, smart, enthusiastic post-doc who really started to even further the nano carriers we were dealing with, and then we were able to show that we were able to create an insulin that could get into the body using these nano carriers in the way we needed it to. But the holy grail with insulin is that you cannot take it currently unless it's injected. And one of the problems with the way that we inject insulin, it absolutely saves lives, and there's no way it doesn't. But the actual way we take insulin is not a fantastic way in that it has side effects of its own because we inject it into areas it doesn't need to go. What we then started to do is develop an oral way to deliver the drug. That was the next step in the process. So it was a very iterative process that got us there. There were 1000s of collaborators along the way; clinicians, scientists, physicists, all sorts of people helped us to get there. Then we started to spin the company out, and we currently have the drug being produced by a company that is also a partnership between the Sydney Local Health District, the University of Sydney. So, it's being manufactured here in Australia for clinical trial beginning in January 2025, so it's been a fantastic journey.

Tegan Taylor  08:44

So you've got a different phase to where Michael's at. Tim, your story is a bit different because you're not working with a drug, you're working with a product. 

Chenyu Tim Wang  08:52

Yes, so we are using artificial intelligence through MRI to identify those brain structure changes may indicate treatment efficacy if works or not. My background, 12 years ago, actually I was working with some more colleagues building the antenna, and never thought about it actually gets into the medical research. However, a lot of my skill sets about image processing and signal processing can really improve the accuracy in monitoring the brain structure change. So this is where I come in. Back in 2012, I joined the Sydney Neuroimaging Analysis Centre and also Brain Mind Centre. With my mentor, we started building service to pharma, to this company their phase two to phase four clinical trials to run their imaging analysis to provide the evidence for their treatment and drugs. And along the way, up to 2018 we had the fortunate to go to CRC-P Grant. That is a fantastic grant and a put in industry University of Sydney, I-MED radiology - several very important partnerships together, have the data, resources, and also expertise, all those key elements to deliver an AI medical device and to helping clinicians and helping the drug-to-drug discovery. 

Tegan Taylor  10:14

And this device has now got FDA approval?

Chenyu Tim Wang 10:18

Yes, we just got our FDA and the TGA approval actually.

Tegan Taylor  10:22

I think for some people who are listening, the idea of the valley of death is something they're painfully aware of. Other people might not have heard of it before. Michael, can you give us a little definition? 

Michael Bowen  10:31

The valley of death is that development period between where you have something that has been discovered, often through a university program, and the point at which you've got it in phase two clinical trials. There's millions and millions of dollars of research that occurs between that point and starting clinical trials, but governments don't tend to fund that research, so relying on the usual funding mechanisms is not really an option. There are some exceptions, but that's where you essentially have to take it out of the university and create a vehicle that allows you to jump over that valley of death and get it to the point where a pharmaceutical industry partner will come in and help in those latter stages of development, where things get really expensive. 

Tegan Taylor  11:17

That's such a different skill set to what a researcher probably has had to have through their career to that point. 

Michael Bowen  11:22

It's not for everyone, and I think that's something really important to note. When you're looking at what's the best vehicle for translating research out of a university, you have to consider what is the appetite and the energy of the researchers. If they want to stay doing academic research, there's nothing wrong with that, but probably looking for a licensing arrangement early on is the best approach, where you find a company that wants to take the technology and develop it. But I actually think that the more success stories come when a researcher is willing to jump in and become an entrepreneur and try and take the program forward, because it keeps that connection. It keeps the connection with the institution where the technology was discovered and that early development went on, and it keeps someone heavily involved in the program that has deep knowledge in the technology. 

Tegan Taylor  12:12

It is something that sort of, in my reporting, I feel like I hear a lot about a lot of discovery happening in Australia, and then a lot of commercialisation happening overseas. Tim, why does this happen? What are we not getting in Australia that other places are doing?

Chenyu Tim Wang  12:27

Speaking for medical device or like AI space, I feel, for example, I went to Silicon Valley this March, and I can feel the vibes about how academics, venture capitals and industries, they really tied up very close. There are tremendous opportunity at almost every single day could have found the places that people talk about ideas. They're matching the technology advancement and market requirement together very well, and also they have a lot of VCs behind that is hunting for those ideas. So this is the part when I was there, comparing to when I was here, when I'm here in Sydney. I'm sure there's a lot of places like here in Sydney, but just as not as much strong that culture in data space, I think this is probably what I feel. I'm not saying like we're competing with the Silicon Valley. Of course, that's just the centre of a lot of the innovations there. But we probably also, I think we needed to identify the uniqueness in Australia and what is our strength. And we can, speaking from the AI point of view, and we can push in our space the position in this innovation process. 

Michael Bowen  13:38

I think things are changing though. When I started out on this journey trying to co-found Konoxis Therapeutics, I got a mixture of advice. The more pessimistic was along the lines of your committing career suicide, just focus on publishing good papers and getting an NHMRC and ARC grants. Australia doesn't do research translation, investors in Australia just focus on flipping houses and investing in mining. I'm proud to say that up until our most recent financing round, which we just closed recently, every single investor in Konoxis Therapeutics was an Australian investor. We now have one US-based investor, and we brought them on not out of necessity, but out of choice, because they bring a lot of expertise to the program that's going to be really valuable to us, and a lot of connections into the US market. You absolutely can produce a startup company in Australia that remains an Australian company through critical stages of development. 

Tegan Taylor  14:33

Did you get that sort of pushback as well when you were looking at going into commercialisation?

Victoria Cogger  14:38

I think academics by nature are quite risk averse, I would say. And I think the whole publish perish sort of mentality is a difficult one to shift, but not really. I think it's actually changed a lot probably since Konoxis really first started. 

Michael Bowen  14:52

I don't think I'd get that advice now. 

Victoria Cogger  14:54

No, I don't think you'd get it at all. And I think the university has a lot of programs now, PERIscope being one of them, there are many. And there are biotech incubators and things that are coming up in Australia. So I think actually the landscape is really changing in Australia. And I think that our drug will initially go to market in Australia. I think it's changed, and I think that there's a very different appetite. I think that it's being driven from both the bottom and the top. There's a push in both directions. And I think universities are actually getting better at getting things out. Certainly, I've noticed a real change in our initial dealings to how it's dealt with now in university sectors. And I think that we are finally starting to change, which is a really good thing. But no, I don't think we ever really got that advice. 

Tegan Taylor  15:38

That's probably a good thing. I am interested in a minute to talk about the role of universities, because they're obviously super critical to this pipeline. But Vic, I'm really interested: in your experience of obviously, if you're working in the pharmaceutical space you end up necessarily working with pharmaceutical companies, with that industry, the pros and cons that you've come across along the way? 

Victoria Cogger  15:58

Yeah, so coming back to the idea that academics are quite risk averse, I think that obviously pharmaceutical companies operate from a very different operating model. And understanding, connecting, and finding a way to navigate that is actually critical in the very first stages, because they come from a profit-driven rather than necessarily a need basis or necessarily a patient perspective. So I think understanding that from the outset is really important. You really need to have a network, and you really need to have people that are going to help you and translate along the way, because you are learning a new skill, you're learning a new language. But I think the great thing about the pharmaceutical companies is that they are willing to invest in research. A lot of them are now not doing research in house. They're doing it via universities or other entities. The SBA (Sydney Biomedical Accelerator), I think is going to be a fantastic opportunity for that. So I think they're probably the things that I would think are important when thinking about working with the pharmaceutical companies. What's their market, and how can you convince them that this is a great tool for them? 

Tegan Taylor  17:03

Tim on AI, it feels like such a buzzword at the moment. Everyone knows that it's the thing that's on the horizon. Has that helped, or is it a saturated market? 

Chenyu Tim Wang  17:12

I think far from saturating, I think so much things just happening every single day. For example, that technology we developed five years ago, we thought that is definitely the state of the art. But until now, you have a lot of transformer models, ChatGPT, even ChatGPT is evolving every single day. There are still a great potential for it to grow. From my point of view, the value of AI hasn't been really recognised this potential. Personally, I think there are still quite a lot of things to grow, absolutely. And the second part about AI is also about a lot of times people see AI, the people I chatter with see AI is like a new web application or mobile application that are novel ideas. You could design the business ideas they're around it to build it. But actually, AI I see is more like an infrastructure, a tool that can translate your current workflow. It’s not necessarily needed to be a new industry, but there is tremendous opportunities in drug discovery, for example, because it has the capability to really transforming the process, complicated data analysis process that actually can really accelerate a lot of things. For example, when I was at Nvidia GTC conference, the drug discovery is one of the major theme. People talk about it the way of how it can pushing, accelerating the process. I think definitely the space to watch. 

Michael Bowen  18:45

Think a good example of how AI is accelerating drug discovery and drug development comes from work that my team is doing at the Brain and Mind Centre. We and is one of the reasons we've been able to accelerate the development program so quickly with KNX100 and with some earlier stage programs we're working on, we've used AI to basically automate the analysis of massive amounts of data that we're collecting from our disease models and data that would have taken two researchers working full time for six months, we can now process by putting it through our high performance computer on a Thursday night, and the date will be there ready the next morning. So the throughput that that has allowed us to work with is just astronomical. 

Tegan Taylor  19:29

Do you think that's going to create more competition for spinning up companies that sort of thing? Or is that good? 

Michael Bowen  19:36

I hope so. It’s a good thing, you know, we need more, particularly in areas of unmet need. That's where we should be working as universities and as small biotechs coming out of universities. We shouldn't be trying to compete with Big Pharma in the areas where they already have massive programs and there's tons of work going on in my opinion. I think we should be working in the areas where there is a huge unmet need, because unlike big pharmaceutical companies, we can be driven, first and foremost by our potential to have impact in those areas of unmet need. 

Chenyu Tim Wang  20:06

Yeah, we're just about to echo with another story, because when I actually started at the Brian and Mind Centre, I was an imaging analyst, so I performing drawing all those pathologies on the brain to perform accurate management for clinical trials. Some of the cases took me like three days to do. So I was saying, part of my motivation to pushing the AI research is actually trying to be lazy.  It's always the engineers, you really don't want to do those repetitive tasks. I think that is what AI could do as well to help radiologists and neurologists, because you don't have to go through this. A lot of the slices of the brain to comparing, oh, there is the change or not, because that can be replaced by AI. So that is actually the first model we developed in our team. Now every single cases will take less than three seconds for the automatic perform the task I used to do require me three days. So that is can save me a lot of time to pushing a lot of new ideas, thinking more rather than doing those repetitive tasks. I think that is what very important AI could do today to help assisted those process. 

Tegan Taylor  21:15

We talked a bit about the barriers, and we've talked a lot about the opportunities. What I'd love to get into is what models we can look to as places that are doing something really well. Vic, what sort of inspires you, when you look at in terms of a model? 

Victoria Cogger  21:29

What inspires me? I think I would say everyone on this stage is inspired to make a difference in people's lives. So I think that's probably the biggest driver for me as a researcher and as somebody that's bringing something to market. But I think there are lots of excellent models that we can look to that are not necessarily in the medical research field, and there's all sorts of agricultural models and all of those sorts of things that are driving agriculture and things forward in ways that I don't think we have adopted yet. I guess the thing that I would say is other countries, America has some excellent ways in which they spin things out. Genentech is a really a great example. We were talking earlier about Google's apparently a fantastic place to work, but the CEO actually thinks it's terrible. Yeah, the former CEO because of the work-life balance issues. So Genentech I think is a place that's really fantastic. You've also got places like the Crick in the UK that I think is a really excellent example of how synergistic research can happen in with industry at the same place. And I think things where we can have academics working with industry, working with patients, working with each other, I think is also very important, the kind of models that we need to be seeing. So very multidisciplinary, very transdisciplinary, and those sorts of things that I think places like the SBA are really going to start to bring home to Australia. 

Tegan Taylor  22:45

I think about tech and that Silicon Valley culture as being very agile, very start up, very looking to the future and quite quick at being able to get something off the ground. What can we learn from tech when it comes to medical innovations? 

Chenyu Tim Wang  23:00

So this actually, I wanted to link back to the death valley aspect we talked about earlier. I identify there is actually two death valley from my own story. One is definitely sometimes we're pushing the technology advancement for the sake of technology advancement. Sometimes it's not necessary, or the market hasn't been ready for it. So once you have the tech, for example, there are hundreds of 1000s of papers published every single day about artificial intelligence to apply that to different fields. And sometimes those technologies not necessarily the market is ready for it. That's needed desperately, so you can find a funding and you can accelerate over that debt value. So that is one aspect. What we could learn from that is definitely to matching the market needs, to understand what is currently required actually better people than matching with the technology for advancement. So not just to focus on to produce the most sophisticated AI models, but it's actually to explore, “okay, how much this actually can help people who could benefit that most”. And most importantly, who will pay for it. So I think that is very important to attract the interest from a VC, post the government funding, post-research funding can get you through that debt valley, that is one. Second one is also it has been another very challenging for medical device this type of space is that, because we require TGA FDA approval to sell it, right? But the process is actually, like for our experience I'm not saying it's slow for TGA, it's about 14 months took us from we submit to get approval. FDA is much faster. It's about, I think, seven months per experience. So once your grants stop there, how you get through that regulatory phase and start generating income? And also, when you start talking to people, you have to wait for that license to happening, then you can start generating income to get you through the market phase. For our example, we definitely have trying to diversify the income stream. For example, supporting it through multiple different collaboration models. So essentially, a lot of those innovations already get embedded in some of the research projects or the industry project partnerships, to get out through that phase, through that valley. So that's our experience. 

Tegan Taylor  25:34

Michael, I'm interested to get your take on the role, all of you actually, on the role of universities because that's the setting that we're in tonight, and what unis can be doing at all different layers of their structure to be enabling this, these innovations. 

Michael Bowen  25:49

Yeah look, universities are absolutely critical. They're the engine rooms of discovery and innovation in areas of unmet need. But universities and the small biotech companies like Konoxis that are often spun out of university programs can't do it alone. And going back to this idea of what programs can really facilitate drug discovery and drug development in areas of unmet need, I love programs that get universities, industry, and government working together. Because one of the biggest barriers is the cost of drug development. So the tough Centre for Drug Development puts the current dollar value of getting a new drug to market at $2.6 billion dollars. That's more than double the combined cost of the budget for all four Marvel Avengers movies.

Tegan Taylor  26:37

Finally, a metric I understand.

Michael Bowen  26:39

Now, what happens when something gets so expensive is larger organisations like big pharma companies can get risk averse, and they can try and back safe bets. Now, in the movie industry, that might mean more superhero movies than some of us, but in drug discovery and drug development, that means no or limited activity in these areas of unmet need. So programs that can get government investing to get it to a point where big pharma gets interested are so important, and an example of that is in one of our Konoxis clinical programs targeting the treatment of opioid use disorder. So we're in clinical stage now, and that's really been facilitated through significant funding from the US NIH. So they have this initiative called the helping end addiction long-term or HEAL Initiative, which was set up in response to the opioid crisis in the US. Some of you may have heard of the opioid crisis, opioid overdose is now the number one cause of death amongst 18 to 45 year olds in the United States. These are people in their prime, they shouldn't be dying. In Australia, it kills more people each year than car accidents. There's only five unique substances approved for treating opioid use disorder. When we took 100 into first in-human clinical trials two years ago, it was the only novel chemical entity anywhere on the planet in development for opioid use disorder. And just to put that in perspective, there's over 3300 compounds in clinical development for the treatment of cancer, so huge disparity there. I'm not saying that's bad, that's great. That's what we need in all these other areas as well. Now fast forward two years, and there are now 17 clinical programs for treating opioid use disorder, eight for novel chemical entities like KNX100. And that's only been possible because of this multi-billion dollar investment from the US government into the HEAL Initiative, which is backing pretty much every single one of these programs. Now some of the big pharmaceutical companies are starting to get interested, because it's over that valley of death. It's been de-risked, and when you're working in these areas that are deemed to be more risky, you've got to get them further along before you get those partners involved.

Victoria Cogger  28:43

Yeah, I was just thinking about the valley of death in terms of getting partners involved, which has been the opposite of our experience. We didn't have that sort of valley of death in the same way, and had been successful in getting translational, targeted research acceleration support from the government, MRFF support. So we've been able to keep it going until we were able to attract the venture capitalist support that we've recently gained. I think that in terms of doing areas of unmet need, I think it's about us convincing people who are suffering those conditions to actually speak to the people that they need to; the government representatives, through their doctors, through their clinicians, and agitate from that direction as well. So I think absolutely we need government partnership, university partnership, but we also need the people that are suffering from these diseases, their carers and all of those sorts of things, to also be agitating in that direction. Because I think without that, we're not going to see the continued support from governments and also from the patients themselves, and potentially finding other people to contribute to the development of these drugs in that way, rather than just relying on the venture capitalists or the industry or the government. 

Michael Bowen  29:54

And getting involved in clinical trials, once it gets to that stage. At that point, the patients become partners, partners in the development in a very real way. And a lot of the time it's challenging to develop compounds once they get to the clinical stage, because it's really hard and slow to recruit for clinical trials in certain areas. So, if you see a clinical trial and you know someone who might be a good fit for it, encourage them to look into it and learn more. 

Tegan Taylor  30:22

Tim, you were nodding furiously. 

Chenyu Tim Wang  30:26

Yes for us, I think important at the University of Sydney, at a university environment, is really to have that partnership, I think is basically the partner can help you to foresee all the risks. And that is not only about just research industry, but I think it's also very important for the venture capitals, the investments that are more than just the NHMRC ARC fundings, to come to help you to foresee the risks. Yeah.

Tegan Taylor  30:55

I will take some questions from the audience now, and the first one, I think is a really great one for the people that we have in the room tonight. Are there opportunities for small investors? We hear about big numbers. What are the opportunities for smaller investors? 

Michael Bowen  31:08

Yes, absolutely. Particularly in the early stages, smaller investors can be absolutely critical. And certainly with Kanoxis, we had a number of smaller individual investors who got on board in those early stages and helped us get over the line in our first financing round, and they were so important. 

Tegan Taylor  31:26

So before we close tonight, for the people who are listening right now who are inspired by this within their realm of influence, what can they do?  

Chenyu Tim Wang  31:34

Just to do it. Stop thinking, just to do it. You want to believe how many actually the normal ideas. I speak with a lot of startup people who have new ideas, but think too much, and the engineering way is working on it, just do it, and fix the problem on the way. And at least this will lead somewhere and you gain that experience. And of course very important actually, in this process to go to those successful case for partnership, for advice. That's of course important, but for me, just to do it, I think this is probably one of the most important thing.

Mark Scott  32:09

That's neuroimaging scientist and engineer Chenyu Tim Wang, the co-founder and COO of the Sydney Neuroimaging Analysis Centre. You also heard from Victoria Cogger, the director of the Anzac Research Institute at Concord hospital, and Michael Bowen, the co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Konoxis Therapeutics.  If you want to dive deeper into the research, Michael mentioned on America's opioid crisis, he joined a previous episode of The Solutionist to discuss a new approach to addiction treatment. 

Michael Bowen  32:44

If it was just about doing a lot of something, then we'd all be addicted to toothpaste. So, it's certainly not about that. It's about having a strong, often uncontrollable urge to use a substance or engage in a behavior that's harmful despite negative consequences.

Mark Scott  33:01

You can listen to that episode of The Solutionists right now. And make sure you're following the show so you don't miss an episode. And for more great ideas from the University of Sydney, and to hear the full hour-long version of this public conversation, visit the Sydney ideas website. We put a link in the show notes. The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. 

The Solutionists is a podcast from the University of Sydney, produced by Deadset Studios. Keep up to date with The Solutionists by following @sydney_uni on Facebook and Instagram, and @sydney.edu.au on Bluesky.

This conversation is originally from a live public talks event, presented by Sydney Ideas – the University of Sydney’s flagship public talks program. You can hear the full hour-long version of this public conversation here.

Listen to Michael Bowen’s previous episode of The Solutionists about America’s opioid crisis here.

This podcast was recorded on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. For thousands of years, across innumerable generations, knowledge has been taught, shared and exchanged here. We pay respect to elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.