WA research centre appeals to philanthropy

A young cooperative research institute in Western Australia is hoping wealthy philanthropists will help it plug a funding gap.

The Western Australian Biomedical Research Institute (WABRI) is establishing a philanthropic foundation to seek $5 million worth of support from wealthy individuals.

The campaign will begin by focusing on WA, which has a relatively high level of per capita philanthropic activity, according to WABRI director Prof Simon Carroll.

WABRI's scientific activities also have an international component which could lead the campaign to move overseas, he said.

It is part of an effort by the 18-month-old institute to raise funding levels. A joint venture between Curtin University, Murdoch University and the Chemistry Centre of WA, the institute collected a one-off $1 million State government injection at birth and its current annual budget is $6.5 million.

Much of that is composed of grants won by its 65 to 70 associated scientists and the challenge for the institute is to fill in missing links and build up critical mass, Carroll said.

Its most recent success in that area was the recruitment of Mumbai University's Dr Mahindra Makhija to set up a drug modelling computational chemistry group.

The institute has identified about 370 compounds in the area of anti-parasitic drug discovery and the addition of Dr Makhija's skills will enable faster qualification of drug candidates among them.

WABRI has a contractual arrangement with GlaxoSmithKline and focuses on diseases which have been overlooked to date by pharmaceutical company drug programs.

It hopes the addition of computational chemistry techniques to its skills set will improve its ability to predict which compounds may prove most suitable for clinical trials.

Besides appealing for philanthropic input, WABRI is investigating opportunities for commercial spin offs from its research activities. It is currently talking with a Sydney-based pre-seed fund about the institute's work with a mimetic for insulin which influences glucose uptake by cells.

A third funding stream could evolve from the pending establishment of a centre to mine WA's biodiversity for useful molecules. Known as the Centre for Biodiversity Innovation, it would use WABRI to drive ecology-based screening for drug discovery programs.

In practice the centre would be associated with the Natural Product Discovery Unit operated by AstraZeneca and Griffith University in Queensland.

WABRI's expertise with parasitic and mammalian systems would be used to provide innovative means of screening plant and microbial metabolites for clues about drug candidates.