NZ Roadshow: Signalling more cooperation

A leading New Zealand biotechnologist has urged Australian and New Zealand medical researchers to establish a trans-Tasman research consortium to explore the body's cell-signalling systems.

Prof Peter Shepherd, of the University of Auckland, believes the future of medicine and drug-development lies in developing a detailed understanding of cellular responses to metabolic and infectious disease, and drug therapy.

Shepherd, a key speaker at this week's Biosphere NZ Roadshow, recently returned from the UK to take up an appointment as professor of cell signalling in the University of Auckland's Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. The scientist-businessman, founder of two biotechnology companies in the UK, was named London's Young Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002. His own research into the insulin-signalling system has provided important new insights into the mechanisms of type 2 diabetes.

Shepherd said medical science needs to not only focus on approaches such as gene array and proteomics, that describe only how much infrastructure is in cells, but to understand how cell function changes dynamically with time, by scanning the states of complex signalling systems that regulate cell function.

Where the high cost of automated gene-sequencing equipment has limited Australian and New Zealand involvement in the genomics revolution, he argues that Australasian researchers are well placed to lead in the cell-signalling revolution -- and their prospects of success will be much greater if they pool their expertise and resources to create a critical research mass.

The research is intellectually intensive, but the costs are relatively low. The key tools -- 'designer' antibodies for measuring and profiling the activity of signalling molecules like cytokines and protein kinases -- are already available, or can be made rapidly and inexpensively.

"Biological systems -- the way diseases work, and the way cells respond to drugs -- cannot be understand in simplistic terms," Shepherd said. "It's critical to understand the functional changes that occur in cells during disease, and what happens when you treat a disease with drugs."

He nominated the cardiovascular system, and the energy balance/appetite system, as potentially fruitful areas in which cellular signalling research was likely to lead to improved treatments, and more effective drugs with fewer adverse side-effects.

Shepherd said major pharmaceutical companies were screening hundreds of thousands of potential drug molecules to identify a few promising candidates for treating a particular disease, but then often had to make a choice without sufficient data to understand how the drugs work in the body.

In some cases, lack of understanding about the ripple-through effects of new drugs on multiple cell-signalling systems has sometimes forced drug companies to withdraw new drugs that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, because of unforeseen side effects. A cell-signalling research consortium could create a platform technology to service to the pharmaceutical industry. It would help to identify problems in advance, as well as making discoveries that could lead to new drugs, and new biotechnology enterprises.

"This is a classic example of where academia and industry in Australia and New Zealand can work together to create new synergies," Shepherd said. "The biotechnology industry, academic researchers, and big pharma can all play a role, and everyone will benefit.

"The biotech economies of Australia and New Zealand will be best served by an open-access research model, because if we try to restrain what the consortium does, or where the intellectual property goes, we'll end up with 100 per cent of nothing."