New drug centre opens for business in Melbourne

The Victorian College of Pharmacy's AUD$17 million Centre for Drug Candidate Optimisation has been officially opened in Parkville.

The CDCO has been set up to work closely with emerging biotechnology companies as well as universities and research institutions to rapidly identify compounds with optimal drug-like properties, performing pharmacokinetics, absorption, metabolism and excretion studies on drug candidates. The information can then be used to help design better candidates, or to move a compound into further development.

"Lead optimisation is about selecting the right compound that is ready and rapidly developable," director Prof Bill Charman told Australian Biotechnology News.

According to Charman, the CDCO uses a unique collaborative model to provide economic value to local companies and institutes. Instead of charging on a fee-for-service basis, the centre enters into a collaborative partnership, where the partner "buys" a full-time-equivalent (FTE) scientist for three, six or 12 months to support the project activities in a transparent arrangement.

Significantly, the CDCO does not retain any rights to intellectual property, which remains with the partner. And all work is performed in an appropriately secure and confidential environment to GLP-equivalent standards.

The CDCO then works closely with the partner to optimise the compound in an integrated process. While the CDCO takes care of all of the optimisation testing, the partner performs any chemical modifications required to make the compound more druggable, as well as efficacy and other biological studies.

Since getting up and running a year ago, Charman said, the CDCO has been inundated with work. "We beat our first year budget by 190 per cent, and we have already reached our target budget for this financial year," he said.

With a goal of 29 projects in the first three years of operation, 12 projects are currently on the books, including two research institute/not-for-profit programs.

One of these is a collaborative program with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute to develop malaria and African sleeping sickness drugs, funded by a $670,000 grant from the World Health Organisation.

The other is part of the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV), funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust among others. The centre is working with the University of Nebraska, the Swiss Tropical Institute and Hoffman-LaRoche to develop an orally active, fully synthetic low cost peroxide-based antimalarial drug.

"We have a compound that will be going into clinical trials next year," Charman said.

The Victorian state government provided $4 million funding to the CDCO through its STI program.

Innovation Minister John Brumby said the centre would play an important role in attracting drug discovery and development activities to Victoria.