Acyte Biotech capitalises on tiny microbes

Two major multinational pharmaceutical companies and two ASX-listed biotechs are vying for the a new biopharmaceutical platform technology developed by Acyte Biotech, a spin-off company from the University of New South Wales.

Prof Peter Gray, Acyte CEO and one of the inventors of the platform technology, said the company had developed a system for rapidly producing a new generation of biopharmaceutical products proteins for use directly in clinical trials.

The technology is not an instrument, but living cell lines engineered to live much longer, eat less and make large quantities of protein that are easier to purify than from other cell lines. These are microbial factories for complex proteins. Its rival technology, 'pharming' - the use of transgenic cows, sheep or goats to manufacture biopharmaceuticals - had promised to deliver large quantities of product, but it has not. "Within five years, platform technologies such as ours are likely to make pharming technology redundant," Gray said.

This is beyond recombinant DNA technology. The new generation of biopharmaceuticals is made up of highly complex proteins that are difficult to manufacture using traditional molecular methods. For example, a complex protein with sugar groups hanging off it may not function if the groups are in the wrong orientation. "If the biopharmaceutical protein is manufactured in a protein-rich medium, its orientation can be altered because it interacts with the surrounding proteins," Gray explained.

Warren Bradey, director of Acyte Biotech and chief financial officer at Unisearch, UNSW's commercial arm, said the technology was "worth in excess of $100 million" after royalties and contracts. For now, Acyte has contracts to trial and optimise the technology in-house with their partners in the biopharmaceutical industry. Bradey said confidentiality agreements prevented him from naming Acyte's partners.

Acyte Biotech has just been awarded $250,000 in the latest round of funding from the Federal government's Biotechnology Innovation Fund (BIF) to further develop the technology. Antibodies, clotting factors and erythropoietin (EPO) are among the biopharmaceuticals the company plans to trial.