AstraZeneca pledges another $35m for Qld biodiscovery partnership

AstraZeneca is investing another $35 million in its joint effort with Queensland's Griffith University to search out naturally-occurring bioactive molecules with pharmaceutical potential.

The multinational company has spent $65 million over the past 10 years on the project without generating any products in the form of a commercially-viable drug.

However the Natural Product Discovery unit operating as a partnership between AstraZeneca and Griffith has turned up about 700 bioactive compounds in that time.

The decision to fund the unit for another five years suggests that AstraZeneca calculates its investment stands a good chance of paying off with a commercially successful lead drug candidate.

The unit is searching for interesting compounds among an existing library of about 35,000 specimens collected primarily from Queensland's biodiversity. That collection is expected to rise to about 50,000 specimens over the next five years. Many of the new additions will come from outside Queensland, according to the unit's director Prof Ron Quinn.

The fresh funding will go mainly into equipment and operating costs rather than increasing the size of the unit which now supports more than 40 AstraZeneca employees.

AstraZeneca Australia MD Jeays Lilley said staff numbers were expected to remain in the region of 45 to 55.

The company's new investment in the natural product discovery unit comes less than a month after it announced a $20 million expansion of its Sydney drug manufacturing facility.

The unit is the largest natural products drug discovery research unit in the southern hemisphere and one of the finest in the world, according to AstraZeneca's UK-based vice-president of enabling science and technology, Dr John Stageman.