Biotron wins Start grant for virus blocker trials

Canberra biotechnology company Biotron (ASX:BIT) has been offered a $1.66 million Commonwealth R&D Start grant to begin clinical development and testing of novel compounds designed to disrupt replication of the AIDS virus.

Biotron, which must match the grant dollar for dollar, will use it to accelerate pre-clinical development of novel molecules that, in in vitro tests, have been shown to block an ion channel encoded by one of the HIV virus' genes.

The company's chemists have synthesised a range of novel anti-viral drugs that jam ion-channel genes encoded by a disparate range of human pathogenic viruses, including those that cause HIV/AIDS, SARS, hepatitis C, influenza and dengue fever.

Biotron's experimental compounds build upon the discovery by Prof Peter Gage, a virologist at the John Curtin School of Medicine in Canberra, that disparate viruses carry genes for ion channels.

The presence of these ion-channel proteins in such distantly related viruses suggests they play some fundamental role in replication -- so molecules designed to block the ion channels might disrupt replication.

Biotron researchers have confirmed that ion-channel blockers do work -- at least in vitro.

The Start grant for testing HIV ion-channel blockers adds to the Biotechnology Innovation Fund (BIF) grant that Biotron received last year to develop antiviral drugs for major viral pathogens that possess ion-channel genes.