UQ innovation licensed to biopharmaceutical company

A new cancer vaccine concept developed by researchers at The University of Queensland's Diamantina Institute has been licensed to US-based developer of RNAi therapeutics, Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, through UniQuest - UQ's main research commercialisation company.

The intellectual property licensed to Alnylam relates to research from Associate Professor Nigel McMillan's molecular virology group, which was described in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The work investigated the use of RNAi to induce an effective immune response against tumours.

One of the aspects of this advancing frontier in biomedical research, according to Associate Professor McMillan, is the potential for treating diseases and helping patients in a fundamentally new way.

“It's one of those Holy Grail areas of cancer research - finding a way for the immune system to ‘see’ cancer cells, which are very good at hiding away," Associate Professor McMillan said.

"Even current therapies such as chemotherapy and radiation treatment ultimately need the immune system to ‘clean up’ cancer cells.

“A surprising finding from our RNAi work is that not only can we turn down genes, but we can also alert the immune system to the presence of a cancer cell.

"This means we can treat a few cancer cells and the immune system, now aware of the cancer, can attack and remove the rest of the untreated tumours.”

Associate Professor McMillan's RNAi research has used cervical cancer as a model system to test RNAi therapy.

“In cervical cancer where genes from the human papilloma virus are driving the cancer, we have shown that turning off these genes by RNAi causes these cancer cells to stop growing and die," he said.

UniQuest Managing Director David Henderson said of the agreement, “This licensing agreement opens up new opportunities for RNAi-based products to be developed into vaccines for cancers and infectious diseases.

“Partnering with an international company such as Alnylam promotes collaboration and makes it possible for the Australian research community to contribute directly to global efforts in the fight against a range of terminal and chronic human illnesses,” Henderson said.

Dr Stuart Pollard, Vice President, Scientific and Business Strategy at Alnylam, said the company was pleased to have secured key vaccine-related intellectual property, which describes opportunities for the advancement of novel RNAi-based vaccines in many human diseases.