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Transcription of Finance News Network Interview with Phylogica (ASX:PYC) CFO and VP Corporate Development, Nick Woolf



Joel Spreadborough: Hello I’m Joel Spreadborough for the Finance News Network and joining me from Phylogica Limited (ASX:PYC) is its CFO and VP of Corporate Development, Nick Woolf. Nick welcome back to FNN.



Nick Woolf: Thank you it’s good to be here.



Joel Spreadborough: So you’ve recently entered into an agreement with Bio-Link Australia, which is a life sciences business development company for the commercialisation of the Phylomer peptide assets. Firstly, can you tell us about the pharmaceutical potential of the Phylomer Peptides?



Nick Woolf: Well this is a family of peptides that target an inflammatory pathway, which has the role in a number of diseases. With this family of peptides, we’ve demonstrated proof of concept in preclinical animal models for traumatic brain injury, ischemia and heart attack, acute respiratory distress syndrome, as well as skin repair properties. So we have these assets, we have been commercialising them ourselves and we’ve now had this opportunity to work with Bio-Link, that have expertise in this area.



Joel Spreadborough: OK. And can you tell us Nick, what were the key factors that attracted Phylogica to this relationship?



Nick Woolf: Well they have particular expertise, Bio-Link that is, in partnering assets that are in the neurological space. And given traumatic brain injury and stroke- ischemia for example- you know we feel they’re well connected with those pharmaceutical companies. And for us at Phylogica, we’re focused on our discovery alliance business, which is our core area of revenue generation. And we thought it was an opportunity to partner with someone that had expertise in the area, that we feel these peptides are most appropriate.



Joel Spreadborough: Now Nick, one of the peptides was licensed to Le Métier de Beauté in November of last year, for use in high end cosmetics. Can you tell us how that relationship is structured and what sort of progress has been made towards a launch?



Nick Woolf: Well that’s a particular peptide, which has shown in animal studies to have effect in skin repair and repair of skin following burns, and following UV burn damage. And we’ve partnered with this cosmetic company; it’s a leading high end cosmetics company based in New York that markets its products across the world.



And they came to us to look to develop it in a serum that they could put into their cosmetic range called Peau Vierge, which they sell in high end department stores in New York like Bergdorf, Nordstrom, in Printemps in Paris. And they’re making excellent progress; they’re most of the way through the formulation. They’ve formulated it into a cream, they’re now looking at putting skin penetration enhances in it. And we anticipate that they will be launching cosmetics with our peptide, before the end of this year.



Joel Spreadborough: This year you’ve also extended a relationship with Janssen Biotech. Can you tell us, what are the key benefits of this association?



Nick Woolf: Well Janssen is the pharmaceutical arm of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), one of the very large pharmaceutical companies. And we signed the deal over a year ago now to develop peptide drug conjugates, where we would use our Phylomer peptides to pull their therapeutic cargoes, across the cell wall and target disease pathways that have been challenging to hit to date, with their payload. So we’re really marrying up two technologies and to date, it’s been very successful.



Joel Spreadborough: So Nick, this collaboration began in January of last year. Can you give us a snapshot of the progress into research of the Phylomer drug discovery platform, alongside Janssen?



Nick Woolf: Well over the first year, what we’ve done is produce customized libraries with their scaffold, their payload linked to our over 170 billion peptides. So this is an enormous library, it’s much larger than our first generation libraries. And we’ve now commenced in the screening process, where we’re screening those libraries of 170 billion peptides against the cell type of interest, to Janssen.



Joel Spreadborough: Now Nick last time we spoke, you said 2013 was a year for Phylogica to reach a breakthrough position. How are you tracking towards positive cash flow?



Nick Woolf: So cash sustainability is an objective of the Company and our focus is on generating near term revenue, through our discovery

alliances. Where we stand in 2013 is we have benefitted from cash inflow from the R&D Tax rebate, we got $2 million in October of last year. And that comes from the fact that we are doing eligible R&D.



We’ve also had a payment from Janssen, a continuation of the research funding, as part of the extension. And we are tracking between now and the end of the financial year, to get a number of payments from both our existing partners, but also from new partners that we’re hoping to close this side of the yearend.



Joel Spreadborough: Finally Nick, 2013. What are your research and commercialisation goals for the full year?



Nick Woolf: Well we’re really continuing the path that we’ve been following for the last few years, our focus very much on revenue generation through our discovery alliances. And also trying to monetise some of the other assets that we’ve talked about, like the inflammatory peptides through Bio-Link. And the skin repair peptide through the cosmetics company.



In addition to that, we’re going to put through further upgrades to the platform and we announced a big upgrade to the platform, at the end of 2012. There’re more components that we’re adding in 2013. And we’re also investing in our in-house pipeline, where we think we can really add value against high value disease targets. And you’re going to hear more about that later in this year.



Joel Spreadborough: Nick Woolf thanks for the update on Phylogica.



Nick Woolf: Thank you.



Ends