Tiresias: Staying the Course

"With G-CSF, we let our patent position go, and that was a bad mistake."

Gustav Nossal

My friends,

Australia punches above its weight in scientific research and discovery in biomedical sciences. Australia has been woeful in development commercialisation and profiting from those discoveries. Australia is in the top 10 countries in first-line biomedical research and publications, but it rates are somewhere around 120 out of 141 countries in development and commercialisation. G-CSF is a prime example of this history. Tiresias thought it worthwhile sharing this story with his friends to enable his friends to understand what headwind Optiscan has faced, being in Australia, trying to develop and commercialise revolutionary world class medical technology.

G-CSF (granulocyte colony stimulating factor, granulocytes are the immune system’s “first responder the front-line white cell troops combatting any invading infections) was the result of work at the Walter and Eliza Institute in Melbourne, led by Donald Metcalf. After over 20 years of hard diligent exceptional scientific work G-CSF was isolated in 1984. G-CSF has enabled modern cancer chemotherapy and has thus far been used in over 20 million patients. Donald Metcalf could not interest anyone in developing G-CSF to a clinical level in Australia and the major pharmaceutical companies were not interested in “biologics” at that time. As a result, Amgen, a start-up, based at Thousand Oaks Californian, which had been fight funded to $19 million US by venture capital, took an interest in G-CSF, and without any payment, progressed it to the clinical stage. When G-CSF received FDA approval in 1991, Amgen’s share-price quadrupled.

Amgen, an $US19million start-up in 1984, is capitalised at $130 billion, with a share price of $232. Donald Metcalf and his team received not a penny. The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute received nothing. Australia benefited, not at all. If mentioned at all, history of G-CSF by Amgen and other companies who now sell it, is mentioned as a serendipitous(accidental) discovery in some quaint place with a quaint name of Walter Eliza Hall Institute. What a crock! It was no accident. It was based on the development of immunology on the back of fundamental work of McFarlane Burnett, the father of modern immunology and Nobel Laureate.

But this is just the tip of an iceberg; it is much worse than that. G-CSF was the first of the biologic growth factors which has been followed by many others and has led to the whole biologics revolution in the pharmaceutical industry, across all fields of medicine. Following on the back of G-CSF which demonstrated the feasibility, and which was scoffed at by investors and pharmaceuticals in Australia, was EPO. And the rest, as they say my friends, is history. Australian market loves to congratulate itself for supporting Cochlear, after 20 odd years in the wilderness, in ResMed which is about as low-tech as you get. Looking at this and many other lost opportunities, it is not surprising that Optiscan therefore has not had support in funding, either private or public. Tiresias feels the frustration of his friends about this, but Tiresias is afraid that calls for government support for institutional financial support in Australia, will as usual, fall on deaf ears. It will come from overseas, but Tiresias trusts that the current Optiscan management know their history. Tiresias sees a new Optiscan advertisements for new staff, foreshadowing Optiscan entering a new growth phase. Tiresias stays the course.