Cerylid touts progress in Japanese deal

Melbourne drug-discovery company Cerylid Biosciences is ready to begin beating the bushes for natural immunomodulatory compounds for its new partner, a Japanese drugmaker.

Cerylid declined to name the Japanese company, but said it was one of the country's top five pharma firms.

Cerylid announced before Christmas that it has already developed a high-throughput screening technique around certain types of immune system cells, and is ready to begin screening a large propertion of its 600,000-plus library of plant, marine-life and microbial extracts.

Cerylid CEO Dr Jackie Fairley said her company was working closely with its Japanese partner, which was "very happy" with the new assay.

Fairly said current immunomodulators like cyclosporine and SK506, variously used to prevent donor-organ rejection and graft-versus-host rejection reactions in bone-marrow transplants, had all come from living organisms.

"The Japanese pharmaceutical industry has been very productive in identifying natural compounds with antibiotic, anti-cancer and immunoregulatory activity," Fairley said.

The new agreement means Cerylid currently has drug-discovery partnerships with four companies in Australia, Europe, the US and Japan.

The company's library of natural extracts is said to be one of the largest inthe world. Most of it was collected in Australia by Melbourne-based pharmaceutical company Amrad, now a part-owner of Cerylid, but Cerylid also has bioprospecting agreements covering the rainforests of Sarawak, and the microbial flora of Antarctica.

Fairley said the Australian biota was a vast, still relatively untapped resource for bioprospecting for new drugs.