Professor Thompson.
Image by Brian Richards, Murdoch University

Professor Andrew Thompson has mixed feelings. He and his team are elated at being close to signing a multi-million dollar deal with a Swiss-based organisation to develop a drug to counter a life-threatening disease affecting millions of people.
 
But it’s a deal that only came about by chance – and years of work could have been abandoned because of the difficulty of getting R&D funding in Australia.

“There’s a growing need for more money to be invested in the Australian pharmaceutical industry, it’s just not happening,” says Professor Thompson, a parasitologist at Murdoch University.

“There’s very little drug development going on in Australia that is properly funded. A lot of it is funded by small venture capitalists and that’s not the way it should be.

“We need to see the big pharmaceutical companies getting involved in the clever research being undertaken in Australia.”

Professor Thompson aired his concerns at a recent BioInnovation seminar. He and his team are carrying out research into tropical diseases such as sleeping sickness, Chagas disease and Leishmaniasis.

For the past few years, he has been undertaking research thanks to funding from the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), based in Switzerland, which aims to find drugs to counter diseases in underdeveloped countries.

Professor Thompson says the original research focused on drugs developed by a pharmaceutical company to counter infections with Giardia, more commonly known as ‘traveller’s diarrhoea’.

“We showed an activity for one of their drugs that they didn’t know about until we did this research for them,” he explains.

“And that proved that this compound could affect a group of parasites that it previously hadn’t been considered to be able to do.

“Working with Wayne Best and colleagues at the start-up biotech firm Epichem, we developed brand new analogues – new generations of these drugs – which bore little resemblance to the original drug.

“We got to the stage where we identified the targets and identified a lead.

“Following this, the research that had to be done was to show how long the drug stayed in the bloodstream (bioavailability), and if it were toxic to the host or carcinogenic.

“And we found it very, very hard to get funding for that sort of research.”

The trouble is no one in Australia could make the final decision on funding this step in the ‘drug discovery pipeline’.

“The problem with getting funding in Australia and dealing with big pharmaceutical companies is that none of them have the capability in Australia to make decisions, everything has to go back to the parent company whether it be in the UK or the US,” he explains.

Fortunately for Professor Thompson and his team, the university put out a media release about their research that was spotted by members of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

“And they said ‘have you thought about applying to the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative in Geneva?’,” he says.

That led to the team getting about quarter of a million dollars a year to fund the research into parasitic diseases.

DNDi is partly funded by the Gates Foundation and because it only wants to utilise such drugs to treat people in developing countries, the researchers are free to use their findings in other markets.

“We can still commercialise these drugs in other areas,” he says.

“For example, there’s a great need at the moment to develop new drugs to treat Leishmaniasis disease in domestic dogs in Europe, because it’s an emerging disease that is spreading rapidly through Europe and is transmissible to people.

“So we have now contacted a multi-national animal health pharmaceutical company who are very interested in commercialising our drugs in that arena.”

The collaboration with DNDi is also paying off in other areas.

Murdoch University has now become the southern hemisphere screening centre for DNDi and a multi-million funding deal is in the wind.

“The Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative is about to sign off on a contract of several million dollars to Epichem and ourselves to work with them to develop new drugs against Chagas disease,” says Professor Thompson.

In his case, it was a stroke of good luck that resulted in his teaming up with DNDi.

But he points out there are many other instances of Australian drug research efforts simply petering out due to a lack of funding.

And if Medecins Sans Frontieres hadn’t spotted the story and told them about DNDi?

“Well, we were close to giving it (our research) away at that stage, and by that I mean giving up.”