Biotechs need to focus on early-stage R&D: experts

Australia's biotech sector needed to focus on improving early stage compound validation to reduce the exorbitant costs of project attrition, experts said yesterday.

In two separate biomedical forums, industry and university experts said the gaping hole in local drug development was early-stage pharmacology and toxicology.

At RMIT University's Drug Discovery Forum executive chair Prof Harry Majewski said 90 per cent of drugs that entered clinical trials did not go on to market.

He said this amounted to massive costs that could be avoided if adequate testing could weed out the unsuitable candidates much earlier in the development process.

Majewski said that while nations like the United States and the United Kingdom already had high-standard pharmacology infrastructure in place to do such tests, Australia did not.

He said the university was looking to fill some of these gaps through the provision of pre-clinical toxicology and pharmacology services.

"What we want to do is eliminate compounds as early as possible," Majewski said. "If we can do better early stage validation, we would spend less money over all but would have more to spend on clinical development."

RMIT Drug Discovery Technologies, based at the university's new biosciences facility in Bundoora, forms part of a pharmaceutical consortium currently bidding for Victorian government financial support.

The Australian Pharmaceutical Consortium - made up of the Victorian Institute of Biotechnology, CRC for Bioproducts, CSIRO division of health sciences and nutrition, Institute of Drug Technology, LaTrobe University, St Vincent's Institute of Medical Research and RMIT - is waiting to hear whether the government will provide the $7.7 million it needs for equipment and infrastructure.

At a separate forum, senior adviser to Amgen Dr George Morstyn said the challenge everyone in the industry faced was the high attrition rates of projects.

Presenting the keynote speech at the Royal Melbourne Hospital's Research Week, he said a project at Phase I had a 20 per cent chance of success, at Phase II a 30 per cent chance of success and at Phase III a 65 per chance of success, illustrating the need to validate targets early and to establish proof of concept to increase potential returns.

Morstyn, who is also on the boards of Bionomics and Cerylid, said the more validation and proof of concept a biotech company could offer, the better there chances also of securing external capital and collaborative agreement with larger players.

Ironically, Morstyn said, Australia's relative lack of funds compared with countries like the US had made its researchers more resourceful.

"Australian scientists tend to be more innovative because they have to think about how to work with fewer resources," he said.

"Also because we're not necessarily in the same instant information flow as in the US, so people tend to be more creative and to search in laneways that would be overlooked elsewhere."