data in a way that advances health and medical research.
Congratulations to Award Winner: Professor Helmut Butzkueven
Professor Helmut Butzkueven (MBBS 1992, PhD 2002), is an academic neurologist specialising in management of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and real-world MS outcomes research.
He is Deputy director of the Melbourne Brain Centre (since 2011) and Director of the MS services at Box Hill Hospital (since 2002) and at Royal Melbourne Hospital (since 2008). He is a current NHMRC Practitioner Fellow, and prior fellowships include an NHRMC Career Development Fellowship and the NHMRC/MS Research Betty Cuthbert Fellowship.
Prof Butzkueven is the Managing Director of the MSBase Foundation (www.msbase. org), a global online MS cohort study which commenced in 2004, with more than 55,000 patients enrolled (117 centres, 27 countries), and more than 230,000 years of patient follow-up.
The key research theme of the MSBase research team is the use of registry data to evaluate treatment strategies to optimise the benefit and safety of the many MS medications.
Findings from MS Base Research have been rapidly translated to clinical practice, and the system has gained the trust of the global Neurology community as a reliable and valuable source of such information.
Real-world evidence is increasingly required to assess the true value of medication to achieve their targets; in the case of MS this is prevention of neurological disability. MSBase provides independent outcomes information to regulators and pharmaceutical companies to assist these crucial evaluations.
MSBase also empowers physicians and patients in second-world countries to participate in and initiate research by providing a world class data management and collaboration system, and is now hosting the national MS registries of the Netherlands, Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, Egypt and Australia, as well as the multi-national Middle Eastern MS registry.
