Herald Sun - March 11, 2015 12:00AM
By John Beveridge
DRUG developer Phylogica is looking forward to the day when peptides are not always mentioned with the Essendon Football Club.
Chief executive Richard Hopkins hopes they will instead form a big pharmaceutical company deal to fight cancer or to develop a new generation of antibiotics.
Phylogica has a big advantage for such a deal with one of the world’s largest libraries of unusual peptides and a method to find just the right ones to perform a task, such as towing a drug inside a cancer cell.
As Dr Hopkins puts it, those billions of peptides are like Lego blocks to build bespoke delivery methods or become effective drugs on their own.
“We take the view that nature has already solved the problem, we just need to find the right application,’’ said Dr Hopkins.
So far the library approach has led to several development deals with large pharma partners, the most recent being a research and licensing deal with Genentech to discover novel antibiotics.
This is an area of great need given the rise of drug resistant super bugs and a lack of new antibiotics to treat them.
Now Phylogica is ramping up to focus more specifically on cancer targets, particularly cancers for which there is no current treatment.
If it can successfully combine a “tow truck’’ peptide with an effective smart cancer drug payload to penetrate cancer cells, an orphan drug indication could be followed by relatively fast clinical trials.
That is yet to happen and Phylogica has been a really promising company on the verge of commercial success for quite some time now.
However, Genentech doesn’t do deals with just anybody and there is a good chance that there could be a peptide in the Phylogica library that could be performance enhancing — for your portfolio.
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