Kill the stereotypes

WEHI is Australia's oldest medical research institute but it has long-standing - and commercially valuable - relationships with the private sector. For Clark, the most important factor is scientist-to-scientist alignment throughout all collaborations. "Get them aligned and you are half-way there," he says. "[Scientists] are the drivers, not business developers. They are the heroes and the ones who make it happen, contrary to popular belief."

He takes a pragmatic approach to the commercialisation route: whether it is industry-sponsored research or institutes spinning out a baby biotech, whatever suits the situation. "I think many in the past haven't realised what an extraordinary amount of heavy lifting is required for a spin-out and how you are chronically undercapitalised, particularly now that big pharma and big biotech are re-engaging."

This was the situation facing WEHI several years ago with its ground-breaking apoptosis research: whether or not to spin it out when "ten-ton gorillas" like Abbott and Genentech were on the playing field. "It would have been absolute madness," Clark says, "so we thought a collaboration was the way to go, and so did Genentech."

The apoptosis collaboration that WEHI is now involved in with both Genentech and Abbott began in the late 90s between, as expected, research scientists. WEHI's Professor Andreas Strasser and Dr David Huang had developed a research relationship with Vishva Dixit, then head of early stage oncology at Genentech. The researchers published together and set the scene for the flow of information.

"Initially Genentech were not that interested in a discovery collaboration because they were unaware of the speed at which we'd set up our own facility and skill base, but by the time we developed early stage compounds, Genentech were very interested," Clark says. "The initial collaboration was purely scientific but that led to a collaborative agreement in 2006."

The other gorilla, Abbott, was at that stage a competitor, but having worked with Genentech on another project, Abbott decided that a three-party collaboration was the way to go. The collaboration is now in the lead optimisation stage for small molecule cancer drugs targeting pathways that control apoptosis.

"During the lead up we put a lot of focus on developing genuine project management systems and getting our lab notebooks as good as they could be, so when Genentech came along to do their due diligence we were on top of it," Clark says. "There is the tendency to assume that academia can be a bit leaky and chaotic. Our goal was to prove that we could work at the same level as they demanded."