Xenome builds team, strengthens US ties

Unlisted Brisbane biotech Xenome is making a strong push into San Diego, hub of the US West Coast biotech industry, in pursuit of venture capital and big pharma partners to develop its long and diverse pipeline of conotoxin peptides from the venom of Australian cone shells.

Xenome today announced a number of key executive appointments, including a US-based chief business officer, David Slack, who will open a new Xenome office in San Diego.

Slack has had extensive experience in business development roles in the US biotechnology industry. He has served as a business development officer with Rhone Poulenc-Rorer Pharmaceuticals and Aventis Pharmaceuticals, and is a former VP of business development with Isis Pharmaceuticals.

Xenome CEO Roger Drinkwater said today Slack would be a key enabler of the company's business and corporate level strategies, and its focus on returning revenue to Xenome's stakeholders.

Company co-founder, and leading Australian animal venom expert Dr Richard Lewis, of the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience, becomes Xenome's chief scientific officer. Drinkwater said Lewis would drive Xenome's "extraordinary potential to discover and develop new drug leads, and would prioritise those lead candidates with the highest probability of success".

Kathryn Radford, appointed VP for business development early this year, after 20 years with Xenome's major investor, venture-capital company Queensland BioCapital Funds, becomes VP for strategic marketing. Drinkwater said she will focus on identifying further value in Xenome's broader peptide array.

Katherine Nielsen, a specialist in IP management and biotechnology commercialisation, formerly with the Institute of Molecular Bioscience's commercial arm, IMBCom, has been appointed director of IP.

"Our focus in Australia is on business development," Drinkwater said. "We're putting David Slack into the US to help us focus on the US finance community -- it's very hard for them to deal with offshore companies.

"He will also work on partnership agreements. We're actively engaged in discussions with a number of large pharmaceutical companies -- again, they're easier to run from a US base."

After promising phase I results from its conotoxin analgesic, for chronic neuropathic pain, Drinkwater said Xenome is committed to two phase II trials -- the first will be announced soon.

"We're looking for partnerships in the US, primarily to get companies interested in using our synthetic venom peptide library as a resource -- it's an exceptionally good drug-discovery platform," Drinkwater said.

"We identify active peptides from conotoxins, then synthesise them, and end up with a library of highly purified compounds, arrayed in a library that is perfectly set up for screening for activity," he said.

"We also have the capacity to identify 'hits' from peptides as drug leads, and a preclinical and clinical platform that allows us to do rapid and effective optimisation of their drug properties."

Drinkwater said potential peptide therapeutics were now attracting much greater attention from major pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.

"We work primarily with conotoxins. We produce vast numbers of highly diverse compounds -- more than we could ever hope to synthesise in the short term. We're doing it as rapidly as our resources allow, but there is still a very large resource in the wild that remains unplumbed."