Mark Fladrich

Ladies and Gentlemen, Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Faculty Dean, distinguished guests, graduates, their families and friends.  I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal and Guring-gai people of the Eora Nation upon whose lands the university now stands. 

It gives me great pleasure to address this fine audience. I’m a tail-end baby boomer – and I’m aware that I’m addressing a group of mostly millennials graduating today.  My younger son is co-incidentally graduating from another prestigious institution tomorrow - so I am rather an authority on millennials.  Whilst you may be inclined to snapchat this speech, or post an inspirational quote of mine on Instagram (I may be flattering myself here) – I do ask that you leave your devices to be scrolled through later.

Thinking back to the time of my own graduation, I can imagine that despite finally finishing your degree, the graduates here today are feeling a level of anticipation but also uncertainty about where their next step will take them. 

My first piece of advice is that in the health care field – there is a world of opportunities out there - and you may have a lot more options professionally than you think…. 

I grew up in rural South Australia – did my Pharmacy degree in Adelaide –an internship in clinical pharmacy at the Royal Adelaide hospital.  Upon completion of my internship, I really only saw three options to work as a pharmacist – research/academia, retail or hospital.  Not being a great fan of the laboratory environment – and not feeling quite ready to commit to options 2 and 3, I decided to go backpacking in Europe.  It’s what we did in the 80’s.

What was supposed to be a 3 – 4 month journey ended up being three successive summers in Europe, supplemented by working in retail pharmacy in between. That kind of behaviour wasn’t uncommon in the 80’s but is probably a luxury these days – with the added pressure of a looming HECS debt.  Along the way I met my wife a nurse in Germany and worked as an English teacher for business people – this was coincidentally the time that I realised that business can’t be all that difficult.  I learnt to speak some German, got married and started a family.   The birth of our first son significantly changed our priorities.   I had to get a real job, and fast.

So we decided to move back to Adelaide.

Perhaps fate played a hand. I was unable to find any jobs in the retail sector and there was a head count freeze in the public service in SA.  Through a pharmacist colleague I had met who worked in clinical research at Faulding – (a name your parents will know well), not knowing much about the opportunities in the industry, I went to an interview and landed my first role in regulatory affairs.   I really haven’t looked back since. 

There may be many of you here today who are very clear about how you are going to take your chosen qualification forward – if so go for it.  But there may be some who are not.  My advice is to take some time to find what really suits you and don’t be afraid to change direction. 

Because to my second point, you will be at your best, if you are doing a job that you enjoy, believe in and are passionate about. This is probably better appreciated by the millennial generation than any other.

Personally, I have found great deal of satisfaction in working in the Pharmaceutical industry. Pharma and other life science industries - are fundamentally important to healthcare improvement as they are the main route by which innovative treatments reach patients.   The impact of innovation on patients and on society over the last few decades has been massive and yet is probably taken for granted.  Let’s take cardiovascular disease - which used to be the biggest killer in Australia - but has recently been overtaken by cancer.  Through better blood pressure lowering agents, statins, stents, bypass surgery and use of anti-platelet agents and heart failure treatments and of course better prevention – eg decrease in smoking rates, the mortality rate from CV disease has been in decline for several decades.

Not only does working in the pharmaceutical industry provide its employees with a sense of purpose, but there are exciting and varied roles to be had in the long and risky process of discovering, developing and commercialising pharmaceutical products.

For the majority of my career I’ve had the opportunity to work on commercialising products in many roles AstraZeneca – this has included helping to shape the clinical development programme of a product, launching new products and expanding indications at a Global, European and Australia and New Zealand level, with each experience bringing new, diverse ideas and cultural perspectives. 

You would be surprised at how often my pharmacology and pharmaceutics training – as well as practical experience gained working in pharmacy has been called upon over the years – so don’t take for granted what you have learnt - and keep it fresh and up to date.  Keeping up to date is especially important because, science, medicine and therapeutics is undergoing a fundamental transformation.  The mapping of the human genome in 2008 triggered a deeper understanding of human genetic make up and has opened up new ways of better understanding human disease and preventing it or treating it. 

If I look back to my pharmacy internship – I remember very clearly a 40 year-old patient with late stage malignant melanoma.  The only treatment that she could be offered was palliative oral steroids to reduce the swelling caused by brain metastases and a prognosis which was a matter of months.  Fast forward to today – new immuno-oncology agents can provide a survival benefit of up to 10 years for a good proportion of patients.  In lung cancer – an area I know well because AstraZeneca has been involved in developing treatments in this area for many years, as recently as 10 years ago, the classification of lung cancer divided the disease into 3 or 4 histological forms.  Today, lung cancer is known to be more than 15 different conditions – with sub-segments of disease being driven by different mutations – and rapid development of treatments to address these driver mutations.   

Looking further into the future, we see the further refinement of personalised therapies, emergence of gene therapy, stem cell and RNA based therapeutics. In parallel to the science revolution, are developments in the automation of many health care processes including the evolution of artificial intelligence for patient diagnosis.

Underlying these changes is the ongoing tension which is being felt across the globe – between the growing costs of health care – driven by aging populations and the growth of non-communicable diseases like type 2 diabetes and dementia, increasing cost of technology and patient awareness of the availability of new therapies and fiscal constraints due to economic uncertainty with every area of the health care value chain under pressure of cost constraint.  

One could say that it has never been a more exciting time to be a graduate in the health care professions, it could also be said that you are also entering a time when the healthcare industry is facing more uncertainty and change than ever before.  I do firmly believe however, is that as graduates from UTS today - you have benefited from world leading approaches to education to equip you to solve problems in a changing world.  A world where technology is emerging and health delivery is transforming at an unprecedented rate.

I would urge each and every one of you, no matter where you plan to participate in the health care field - to play an active role in helping to transform this landscape for the benefit of the patients we serve. 

Thank you for your attention.