Norwood Abbey spins out immunology project

Norwood Abbey has spun out its immunology project into a separate company, which will be listed in Europe or the USA within the next 12 months.

Norwood Immunology is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of Norwood Abbey, which intends to retain a majority share in the new entity. The planned listing would add significant value for the company's shareholders, Norwood Abbey's executive chairman Peter Hansen said.

"Norwood Immunology's technology has extremely broad applications, and we expect the opportunities created by this listing to be significant.

The new company will have access to international capital markets, allowing it to realise the value of its technology," said Hansen. "It is anticipated that the company will raise funds prior to listing primarily for commercial operations and the expansion and extension of intellectual property."

Former Anderson Healthcare executive Richard Williams has been appointed as CEO of Norwood Immunology, and will remain in London, where his 20 years experience in fundraising, corporate finance and commercialising healthcare projects, as well as links to the pharmaceutical industry will be put to good use in developing commercial partnerships, and securing strategic investors and partners for the project.

Williams will also play a role in getting the new company ready for public listing.

According to Jeffrey Bell, Norwood's chief financial officer, Norwood is considering both NASDAQ and London's AIMS as potential markets to list Norwood Immunology.

The new company has been created to commercialise the intellectual property from Monash immunologist Associate Prof Richard Boyd, whose work on T cells and the thymus has underpinned platform technology with a wide range of applications.

The technology focuses on using analogues of Gonadotropin Releasing Hormone (GnRH) to regrow the thymus gland in adults, inducing the production of new T cells.

The action of the drugs is to temporarily halt the production of sex steroids, which inhibit the immune system.

Boyd has also worked extensively on stem cells, last year demonstrating the presence of stem cells in the thyroid which may allow the tiny organ to be regenerated and possibly even reprogrammed.

Bell said that the first thrust of the technology would be to regrow the thymus for the treatment of various diseases including cancer. The company has already conducted an independent clinical trial on leukaemia patients receiving bone marrow transplants, demonstrating that patients receiving GnRH analogue treatment had improved immune system function compared to a control group.

There was also no evidence of treatment-related side effects.

The trial has been well received by international experts and Norwood recently established a medical and scientific advisory board comprised of a number of eminent researchers from around the world including Dr Bruce Blazer, Professor and Andersen Chair in Transplantation Immunology at the University of Minnesota, and Dr Lee

Nadler, Senior Vice President Experimental Medicine at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, Massachusetts.

Norwood has also entered into a collaboration with a number of leading hospitals in the US, to perform a larger-scale clinical study, which is expected to start once a pharmaceutical partner has been signed on to assist with the clinical trials process and help commercialise the technology.

"We're at a very late stage of negotiations to secure a commercial partnership - we're within reach of the finishing line," said Bell.

The company is anticipating its first royalties from GnRH analogues late in 2004.

Norwood Immunology has also recently signed a heads of agreement with the National Stem Cell Centre to establish joint R&D and commercialisation activities.

Boyd is a key scientific member of the NSCC, and the areas of focus for the collaboration will be immune tolerance, thymic stem cell development and thymic manipulation, with an eye to developing clinical products.