Peter Mac spin-off nets European funding

The Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre has spun out its cellular therapies services into a small company called Cell Therapies, in order to make the most of its TGA-licensed Centre for Blood Cell Therapies.

Cell Therapies, which was set up through business incubator Information City Victoria in May this year, will offer cell therapeutic services, such as clinical trials, on a fee for service basis, and will also provide a vehicle for collaborative ventures not suited to involvement by the hospital.

Revenues from the company will flow back into the CBCT to support R&D activities. The idea, said managing director Ray Woods, is to make the $3 million laboratory a self-sustaining enterprise. "Clearly a $3 million facility needs a sizeable income just to stay still," he said.

Essentially Cell Therapies is acting as a business interface to the CBCT laboratory, said production manager Dr Dominic Wall.

The laboratory got its start several years ago, when Wall and CBCT director Prof Miles Prince projected that cellular therapies would become an essential part of medicine. The Peter Mac backed their hunch by building a $3 million laboratory. The pair took it further, with the CBCT becoming the first TGA-licensed facility to produce cell-based therapeutics for clinical use.

But the laboratory found that its unique facility was attracting the attention of companies looking for sites to manufacture cellular therapies for clinical trials and other activities. Among its customers are French company IDM and Germany's Orthogen Group, with more in the pipeline.

Along with IDM, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre is collaborating with four other international groups on a program to develop therapeutic vaccines from dendritic cells funded by a AUD$3.3 million Sixth Framework grant.

Other participants in the program include the Children's Cancer Research Institute (CCRI, Austria), Etna Biotech (Italy), the Istituto Superiore di Sanita (Italy) and the University of Regensburg (Germany).

Unusually, the Peter Mac is not required to provide its own matched funding to the program as its contribution, in the form of cell tracking technology, is considered essential to the program, according to Wall.

The cell tracking technology involves irreversible labelling of cells with radioactive or other tags, which after administration to the patient can be localised using tomography imaging techniques.