Professor Jamie Cooper AO

BMBS ’80, MD (Adel) ’97

By David Sly

 

The impetus to continue exploring better medical solutions and keep learning has propelled the landmark career achievements of Professor Jamie Cooper AO – and he recalls that this journey of exploration first took shape during his formative years studying medicine at Flinders University.

“At Flinders, we learned that medicine would always be constantly changing, and over the following 50 years, it certainly has,” says Professor Cooper, who was part of the first intake of medical students at Flinders University in 1974.

“We learnt how to keep searching for information, and that has never stopped.”

Awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 2017 and Flinders University’s highest honour, the Convocation Medal, in 2020 for his outstanding contribution to national and international intensive care medicine, Professor Cooper has been an inspiring leader in traumatic brain injury research.

“I grew up during my six years at Flinders, changing from an immature 17-year-old into a more sensible 23-year-old who wanted to travel and specialise in hospital-based medicine. I was always proud of being in that first year of the Flinders Medical School, and wanted to show everyone that we were good, solid doctors out in the real world.”

Advances in Intensive Care

While completing his training as a physician, a young Dr Cooper was exposed to work in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and he enjoyed the challenge of working at speed to assess patients and having a huge bearing on their health outcomes. This experience also set his mind racing about what intensive care therapies demanded more focused attention and improvement.

“Intensive care was a relatively new area of specialisation when I started, and there was a lot of dogma that was not well supported by high-quality research, so we never really knew whether some of the techniques we used were beneficial for patients or not,” he says. “It set me on a path of building small and then large clinical research trials in conjunction with intensive care colleagues in other Australian states and many other countries, which took time but really could change the way we managed our patients.”

A pragmatic need set Professor Cooper along this research path. He encountered a high number of traumatic brain injuries while working at Alfred Hospital ICU in Melbourne, and he devised high-quality trials with these patients, leading a network of ICU sites to ensure results that were applicable internationally.

 

Global Impact

Of particular note, he led a randomised trial of a neurosurgical operation over eight years for ICU patients with traumatic brain injury. The trial found that surgery was great at decreasing brain pressure in the short term, but poor at improving patient outcomes. Indeed, head injury patients in the trial recovered better in the long term, after medical intensive care alone.

There was a global impact, resulting in better neurosurgical planning for brain injury patients. This approach led to a remarkable sequence of big research outcomes, with Professor Cooper driving a large and diverse research team from Alfred Hospital and Monash University that has been supported through 25 years of continuous National Health and Medical Research Council funding. In working with other intensive care units from across Australia, New Zealand and 20 other countries, this strong collaborative network has produced five high-impact randomised trial results in traumatic head injuries, applicable across many domains rather than just= in one small area.

 

Inspiring the Next Generation

Professor Cooper continues to work in a multi faceted capacity – as Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University, and Senior Specialist in Intensive Care at The Alfred Hospital, Melbourne – though he perhaps views his most important role now as a mentor, especially to mid-level academics. “I see them being in the same position that I was 20 years ago, and I see my role as trying to help them get their first grants, to continue the research they are pursuing, and to keep their motivation going.”

His capability in this regard is without question, having published 430 journal papers (with 11 in the New England Journal of Medicine) and received $91 million in research funding, which has delivered life-changing results for seriously ill patients and resulted in significant savings to the Australian healthcare system.

“I was led by the people who taught me. There were only 64 medical students in that first intake at Flinders, and we were initially located in the main university building while we watched the medical school in Flinders Medical Centre being completed.

When we finally got into the new facility, it was all so fresh and new – and empty. It was just us and a handful of professors, so we all became very close, and those professors became great role models to us.”

 

Quest for Learning and Research

The close-knit Flinders medical fraternity also appreciated that they stood at the threshold of a new enterprise that presented an opportunity to explore and reach for innovations in medicine.

“Flinders’ medical course was set up in a new way – the curriculum being modelled on the esteemed McMaster University curriculum from Canada – and many of us were excited and attracted to this new system,” says Professor Cooper.

“It equipped us with the capacity and desire to keep learning, to expand on our interests over time. We did this of our own volition; we didn’t have access to personal computers or mobile phones until at least a decade after we graduated, so we had to search hard to find answers to our questions – but we realised how important it was for us to keep learning and pursuing important lines of research.”

Professor Cooper’s rigorous pursuit of more medical knowledge continues. He is currently leading his sixth randomised clinical trial in traumatic brain injury, using a special device to measure oxygen levels in the brain after injury to help maintain the best possible levels while unconscious during ICU and surgery, then to adjust therapies individually, to give patients their best chance of good outcomes.

“It’s complicated and I’m sure it will take a long time, but the most exciting thing is that I’m sure this will have an impact,” says Professor Cooper. “We have created an Australian-led model for these randomised trials to determine the best options for improving a head trauma patient’s longterm function and outcome.”