When local synthetic antibiotics developer Recce Pharmaceuticals announced they had entered into an antiviral Sars-CoV-2 screening program in partnership with the CSIRO and the University of Melbourne’s Doherty Institute back in July, the news threatened to overshadow some of the other pioneering work being undertaken by the health company.
The company is a potential world leader in something much larger in the long term: helping us combat our growing resistance to antibiotics.
Recce’s executive director, James Graham, says the company’s story is a classic Australian innovation story.
“It started in a retired chemist’s garage and as he tinkered away he realised carpentry wasn’t his thing so he picked up his test tubes again,” Graham says.
The retired chemist was Johnson & Johnson’s former head of research, Graham Melrose and what he was endeavouring to uncover was a synthetic compound that would overcome the superbugs now mutating as the world develops antibiotic resistance.
Fast forward a few years and besides the Sars-CoV-2 partnership the company’s executive director of regulatory affairs & microbiology, Michele Dilizia will deliver the opening R&D Address at the World Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) Congress next month outlining the case for further developing synthetic antibiotics.
Graham says Australia punches well above its weight in medical technology because we “think outside the square”.
“Moreover, we have an extraordinarily valuable R&D rebate scheme in Australia where we get 43.5 per cent back on every $1 we spend.
“So if we spend $5 million on R&D applicable research, that's about $7 million of true cash runway. That incentivises us to stay local, to build local know-how and advance the technology for intended sale in international markets,” he says.
Yet staying in Australia does present some challenges because Australia accounts for only 3 per cent of the global antibiotic market whereas the US accounts for 48 per cent. It’s for this reason many local players move offshore but Graham says the company is committed to having its manufacturing base here.
Furthermore, beside the partnership with the CSIRO and Doherty Institute, who have chosen Recce’s compounds RECCE® 327 and RECCE® 529 as their priority-one test candidate against coronavirus, the company is the only one in the world that has a qualified infectious disease designation awarded by the US Food and Drugs Administration for sepsis.
“This designation provides us 10 years of market exclusivity above and beyond a patent position. So that's a government-backed 10-year market exclusivity only from time of approval,” Graham says.
“And while that's incredibly unique, we also have a pending human application for dosing on wounds in a West Australian hospital in a burns' department led by a very prominent burn specialist.”
For Graham, medical technology is just one of many potential winners for Australia that will transition the economy away from rocks and crops in the 21st century.
“Importantly, we’re in a place that supports innovation and right now, we’re an infectious disease company in the midst of a global infectious disease crisis. We could choose anywhere to be but there's nowhere we'd rather want to be than Australia and we always will be here,” Graham says.
Another local biotech player keen to see Australia look for riches beyond digging up the earth is the chief executive of Prescient Therapeutics Steven Yatomi-Clarke.
Prescient are developing oncology drugs but not chemotherapy which Yatomi-Clarke refers to as “awful”. What sets the company apart is they’re developing two different types of therapies.
“One is called targeted therapies, which switch off the cellular pathways that lead to cancer and we're also in a brand new field of immunotherapy called CAR-T (Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cell).
“CAR-T seeks to weaponise the patient's own immune system by retraining it to recognise and attack cancer. They both fall under the umbrella of personalised medicine,” Yatomi-Clarke says.
According to Yatomi-Clarke, the nation could become a health sector powerhouse but he suggests we need to be picking certain sectors in which to build critical mass rather than “spreading ourselves too thin” which we’ve tended to do in the past.
He suggests cell therapy and CAR-T are two areas where we have a degree of infrastructure and expertise already in place and we could become a regional hub for those.
Moreover, Prescient are already working with some of the world’s leading cancer research institutes. They’re currently undertaking clinical trials at the Moffit Cancer Center, which is the third largest cancer centre in the United States and at the Kansas University Medical Center.
Closer to home, the company is collaborating with Adelaide-based Carina Biotech to develop new CAR-T targeted cell therapies to combat solid tumours and as reported in the Financial Review last month, Prescient announced a research collaboration with the world-renowned oncologist Professor Miles Prince at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne.
The company has also signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with the University of Pennsylvania and has another licensing agreement with the University of Oxford.
And the opportunity for Australia in the space is enormous considering Deloitte’s 2020 Global Life Sciences Outlook predicted oncology is expected to have almost a 20 per cent share of the worldwide life sciences market by 2024.
“Australia is very well positioned to create an Asian time zone cell therapy hub and we could be exporting medicines around the region and people could also be coming here for certain cutting-edge CAR-T therapies.
“It's one of the genuine value-added sectors that Australia can really make a difference in,” Yatomi-Clarke concluded.
RCE Price at posting:
$1.48 Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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