Telethon Institute closes in on Holy Grail, page-2

Telethon institute closes on cancer treatment’s holy grail

September 11, 2015, 2:00 pm
The West Australian
Daniel Hatch

It is the holy grail of cancer treatment — a drug that not only cures the disease, but has no side effects.

Achieving that is the mission of the Subiaco-based Telethon Kids Institute and, incredibly, it is a goal the organisation is close to reaching thanks to some innovative research.

Professor Paul Watt, chief scientific officer at Telethon Kids Institute spin-off company Phylogica, said cancer drugs made a real difference to patients, but they were often highly toxic. That meant the effectiveness of any treatment was dependent on the patient’s tolerance of the drug. It was that problem the Institute’s research hoped to negate.

“Around the world there are a number of groups that are developing ‘smart drug’ therapeutic approaches,” he said.

“The uniqueness of our approach is to look at natural protein structures from the biodiversity of nature.

“For example we take proteins that come from microorganisms that live in deep-sea volcanic vents or in geisers.

“What we did was to break down these proteins into their parts and some of these parts have very diverse shapes and we can use these shapes for a new purpose as keys to if you like, lock the door to some of these diseases like cancer.”

Professor Watt said the institute had 20 scientists working on these problems, backed by a network of national and international collaborative partners, including big international pharmaceutical companies.

The institute has received $73.8 million in research funding over the past five years, including $29.4 million in the past year. Its research is highly respected, having appeared in 918 peer-reviewed scholarly research articles over the past five years and cited more than 22,000 times in scientific journals over the same period — so the institute really is at the leading edge of research.

Phylogica chief executive Richard Hopkins said the institute had been exploring novel concepts and approaches to developing “smart drugs” over the past decade and, taken together, that research appeared to be coalescing into a drug that was “working very, very effectively”.

Dr Hopkins said the new generation of smart-drugs was highly targeted.

“They are very much like Exocet missiles, where they are able to hunt down just the disease cell and the disease target,” he said.

The drug then binds to the disease cell and attacks only the disease.

“That means you can load up a lot more of the drug and the quality of life for the patient is profoundly improved, because you don’t have all these off target or toxic effects.”


Dr Hopkins said some of the disease targets the institute was researching had been known to play a critical role in cancers for more than forty years and one they had in their sites was present in about 70 per cent of all cancers that occur in humans.

“It’s a very topical target and big pharma’ hasn’t been able to hit it effectively yet,” he said.

“So we’re one of the first generations of technologies that seems to be having some success against this target.”

Dr Hopkins said the challenge for Telethon was to develop their technology to a point where “looks like a drug”, which would take another two to three years.

“Drug development takes about ten years,” he said.

“I guess the key focus for us as we move through the drug development stages is to start collaborating more extensively with worldwide groups as we internationalise the technology and the company itself.”

https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/f...tute-closes-on-cancer-treatment-s-holy-grail/