Apollo claims competitive advantage

Recently listed Sydney biopharma Apollo Life Sciences (ASX:AOP) has claimed that its human-expressed vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein involved in the formation of new blood vessels, performs five times better in an international proliferation test than a leading competitor's protein and the World Health Organisation's (WHO) protein standard.

VEGF is a naturally occurring revascularisation protein used in developing treatments for coronary heart disease. Apollo's VEGF is one of 60 human-expressed proteins, from which Apollo intends to select a few for clinical development, said Apollo chairman and CEO John Priest.

"The competitors are all using E. coli expression systems in this instance. The difference is we're using human-expressed proteins," said Priest.

The test was conducted by US-based SBH Sciences on behalf of Apollo, to validate internal testing already done by the company, using a standard colorimetric assay.

"This is just one dimension, there are many others tests that we're doing," he said. "We're looking at both the structure and the function of the protein. A lot of that is still in progress."

The in vitro test measured the protein's ability to stimulate cell proliferation of human umbilical vein endothelial cells, with significantly less of Apollo's VEGF needed. "Because it's more active, you don't need to use as much," said Priest.

Apollo intends initially to commercialise its VEGF in the research reagents market and is also working to develop a VEGF-based product for the coronary heart disease market.

"We're going to make this product and many others available to researchers so that they can investigate the difference," said Priest. "We will be selling it in the next couple of months. At the moment we're just getting our production systems and packaging systems right."

Priest said the company would make the test results public when the product went to market.