Cytopia unveils new HQ

Brand new labs on the fifth floor of the Baker Medical Research Institute have become the new home for Melbourne biotech company Cytopia.

The new facility, which cost $5.5 million, brings together all of the company's 33 employees under one roof. Previously they were scattered around Melbourne in a number of locations.

"It's the first time that all of those components of our drug discovery engine room have been put together in the one place, and it's a very exciting time for us," said Cytopia's chief scientific officer Dr Andrew Wilks at the opening.

The new facility has four labs (for medicinal chemistry, protein chemistry, high-throughput screening and computational chemistry) focusing on the company's interest in developing small molecule drugs to act on JAK kinases, an important component of cytokine signalling pathways.

Wilks said JAK kinases were central to the proliferation of many cancers, and also could be used to target immune system disorders. But for now, the company is putting its main effort into developing a drug to treat hormone refractory prostate cancer, the most serious form of the disease with very few options for treatment.

"We've made very significant progress. We've got some very potent molecules in vitro, our in vivo studies are progressing and they're going very well and although this is a forward looking statement, I want you to know, we're hoping to have something to be able to put into the clinic towards the end of the year 2003," Wilks told the crowd of scientists and investors.

Cytopia CEO Dr Kevin Healey said that the opening of the new facility was a landmark step for the company, which is 90 per cent owned by Medica Holdings (ASX: MCA).

"When you look around at Cytopia's competitors, you have to go a long way to find someone or some company that's more advanced in terms of its technology development and more focused in terms of its intellectual property," he noted.

Federal Science Minister Peter McGauran was on hand to cut the ribbon for the new facility, as was former footballer Robbie Flower, who described his own experiences with prostate cancer.

Cytopia has key collaborations with the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York, the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research's Melbourne branch, and the Queensland Institute for Medical Research as well as a commercialisation agreement with US biotech Chemicon International.

The company recently received $240,000 from the Biotechnology Innovation Fund (BIF) to develop its proprietary Chemaphore software platform to test how well molecules bind to the proteins involved in causing diseases in silico, and also announced a supercomputing deal with IBM Life Sciences.