Play to your strengths, says IBM's Kovac

Caroline Kovac, the US-based business leader of IBM's Life Sciences division, says Australian biotechnology should remember it is playing in a global market and consider its strengths, including a good education system and strong scientific base.

"One of the success factors [for Australian biotech] will have to be access to capital," Kovac said on a visit to Sydney this week. "Put your assets to work and you can attract capital from overseas."

Kovac's last visit to Australia was in September 2001, when she announced that IBM had selected Sydney company Proteome Systems as its first life sciences partner.

"When we did the deal with Proteome Systems, it wasn't because we wanted to find an Australian customer," she said. "It was because the company had the world-leading platform."

On this trip, Kovac spoke about its recent supercomputing deal with Melbourne company Cytopia, a subsidiary of Medica Holdings.

Cytopia's focus is on the development of drug candidates to block the action of proteins that trigger immune diseases and cancer. The company recently developed a software platform, Chemaphore, that enables the design of chemical libraries, in silico screening, and detection of drug candidates.

IBM's equipment will enable the complex calculations that can map the proteins' changing shapes and determine the potential impact of a chemical on the proteins.

Kovac said that IBM was often seen as being too big to work with small customers like Cytopia.

"But we think a tremendous amount of innovation is coming from small to medium-sized biotech companies like Cytopia," she said. "It's a very exciting new customer set. Working with customers like Cytopia, we learn about working with a new, emerging market."

Cytopia's research director, Dr Andrew Wilks, said that because of the complex nature of the calculations in Chemaphore, each test could take several minutes. But the new IBM platform could reduce the time taken to screen a virtual library by a factor of 100, he said.

Medica managing director Dr Kevin Healey said Cytopia originally developed Chemaphore for itself, but was now clear it had "enormous potential" for other companies.