Cytopia close to selecting first drug lead compound

Melbourne drug discovery company Cytopia is close to selecting its first drug lead compound for the treatment of hormone refractory prostate cancer (HRPC), after getting encouraging results from pre-clinical animal studies.

"We've got some quite exciting data," said CSO Dr Andrew Wilks. "There really is no cure for hormone refractory prostate cancer, so if it pans out in humans it would be tremendous."

Wilks said that both pharmacological and efficacy studies were being done, with Cytopia's drug candidates being benchmarked against existing drugs including Novartis's cancer drug Glivec, which he described as being similar in design and concept. He noted that one of the lead compounds demonstrated 20-fold greater activity than Glivec against chronic myeloid leukaemia cells.

Preliminary data from efficacy studies in mice has demonstrated partial reduction of tumour size of up to 50 per cent, compared to untreated control mice. Wilks said that the final selection of a lead compound would probably take place in January, and the company hoped to go into the clinic with the drug toward the end of 2003.

"We need to go through a few more animal studies, looking at dosing regimes and so on," explained Wilks. "We hope to get complete ablation of the tumour, not just a reduction in size."

In addition, Cytopia has lodged three more patents around the potential drug candidates, bringing its patent portfolio to 12 patents or patent applications. "I think we're building up quite an extensive patent portfolio," Wilks said.

CEO Kevin Healey said that the pre-clinical data would give the company a good package to take to potential partners next year. The company is hoping to partner with a large pharmaceutical company, and has already begun preliminary discussions with a number of potential partners.

"There may be some small partnerships for non-core applications, but for the JAK kinases we're looking for one broad alliance with a large pharma," Healey said.

He explained that Cytopia wanted a partnership which would allow the company to develop a number of key applications itself, while other applications would be developed by the partner company.

Healey also said the results of the pre-clinical studies provided validation of Cytopia's Chemaphore platform.

Spin-off planned

Healey said Cytopia's parent company Medica Holdings planned to establish a separate entity in 2003, external to Cytopia, that would have a license to use the Chemaphore platform in contract research for companies wanting to take advantage of the in silico drug discovery and high-throughput screening technology for their own programs.

He added the spin-off company would probably concentrate on the Australian market initially.