NZ's Proacta stitches up $11.5 million in venture capital

Auckland anti-cancer drug developer Proacta Therapeutics is celebrating after stitching together a venture-capital deal to begin human clinical trials of two of its lead compounds next year.

Proacta, a joint venture between the University of Auckland and Stanford University, has raised US$8 million (AUD$11.5 million) from a syndicate headed by leading Australian bioscience venture-capital group GBS Venture Capital Partners.

The syndicate’s other members are major US biopharma Genentech, Switzerland’s Roche Venture Fund, and two New Zealand VC funds - No 8 Ventures Management, and Endeavour-iCAP.

Proacta’s first use of its new funds will be to patent its IP and hire new staff, before taking two of its novel, anoxia-activated pro-drugs into Phase 1 clinical trials early next year.

Proacta CEO Aki von Roy says one of those compounds will be benzene mustard, which completed toxicity tests in May last year.

Proacta was founded by Prof Bill Denny and Prof Bill Wilson, of Auckland University’s Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, in collaboration with Prof Martin Brown and Prof Amato Giacca, of the department of radiation oncology at Stanford University.

All are world leaders in the field of tumour hypoxia. Van Roy said research has shown that some 65 per cent of solid tumours, despite growing new blood vessels to fuel their rampant growth, have significant regions of anoxia.

Anoxic cells are resistant to conventional radiation therapy and chemotherapy, which kill cancerous cells by generating toxic oxygen radicals.

Denny and Wilson have synthesised whole families of compounds that are activated by low oxygen levels. Some are showing high promise as targeted chemotherapy agents, or as enhancers of conventional chemotherapy agents like cis-platin.

Von Roy said Proacta had experienced great difficulty attracting venture capital, because of New Zealand’s remoteness from major VC markets.

“There is no shortage of companies vying for attention for their new cancer therapeutics on the doorstep of big investors in the US and Europe,” he said.

“It has been very hard work trying to communicate with 40 venture capitalists around the world, but it’s nothing less than we expected,” he said. “We’ve finished up with five – and some people are still amazed that we managed to get finance at all.

“We now have sufficient funds to take two lead compounds through to the end of phase 1 trials, then we’ll need additional financing.”