Valley of lost opportunities

The Genentech/Abbott partnership is just one of many that WEHI is involved in. Another is the new CRC for Cancer Therapeutics (CTx), which Clark was heavily involved in establishing.

While CTx is a CRC and as such has a heavy research focus, it most definitely has an eye on commercialisation. One of the partners is the UK's Cancer Research Technology (CRT), the commercialisation arm of Cancer Research UK, one of the world's largest charities with donations of around $700 million per year.

"The CRC is unashamedly established on the fundamental idea of copying and improving on CRT," Clark says. "They come in and pop training wheels around us, and by the end we aim to be a self-sufficient company just as they are."

In addition to WEHI and CRT, the other partners are CSIRO Molecular Health Technologies, Monash University, Peter Mac, the St Vincent's Institute, the Bio21 Cluster and the Cancer Council Victoria, all in Melbourne. Griffith University's Eskitits Institute is on-board, as is Adelaide biotech Bionomics, and US equipment giant Millipore.

CTx is also unashamedly a product development CRC, he says. Bionomics will be doing some commercialisation of their own targets while also contributing skills in medicinal chemistry and high-throughput screening. All other commercialisation will be handled by CRT.

"This is [a project] that is taking the issue of industry and academia and addressing the funding gap, what we call the Valley of Lost Opportunities," Clark says. "As taxpayers we generously pour money into great cancer research that can't go anywhere because there are not these bridging funds. And the cruel irony for us is that medical research institutes are not eligible for pre-seed funds. We do have opportunities but they can't go anywhere.

"We deliberately set out not to be dominated by a single big pharma because they have their own agenda and they tend to cherry-pick. Whereas CRT is the translational conduit for Cancer Research UK ... by definition they are not allowed to cherry-pick. So long as it is related to cancer and it is valid and sensible they have to run with it. That's exactly what we want to do - to be a portal and gatekeeper for Australian science."

As Clark points out, regulatory authorities like the US FDA are requiring more information and evidence from basic science at earlier stages in the drug development process. "Because a lot of our drug development these days is addressing novel targets, the science is less understood," he says.

"What it highlights is the high risk of drug development in the cancer area and the fact is that the biology is still not well understood. That's why my emphasis is that you must have multi-disciplinary teams all the way from laboratory molecular biologists through to clinicians, to chemists and onwards. These are first in class drugs, very high risk, no guarantee whatsoever.

"You have to have those disciplines - the clinical oncologists and the chemists - sitting around the same table. It makes sense and it's a lot more fun, because you have cultural diversity, which is great."

This is something that Dan Grant agrees with. Each year, Pfizer Australia invests about $50 million in science, a large portion of which is on clinical trials. It also spends a large portion on collaborations with leading universities and research institutes. Globally, Pfizer spends approximately $7.5 billion on R&D, much of it external. Why so much, when it employs 12,000 people in R&D alone?

"We are very good at doing in-house research and we have been very successful over the years but we've come to realise that we represent a very small portion of what's being done in health and medical research," Grant says. "We are about three to five per cent, which is quite a lot, but we still need to be interacting with the world's best scientists."