Alan Taylor raised $1.1 million to commercialise personalised medicine companion diagnostic research.
Personalised medicine: it is not only a global biotech buzz phrase but is revolutionising the way patients are treated for cancer.
Professor Mathew Vadas, executive director of the Centenary Institute medical research centre at Sydney University, says personalised medicine is creating excitement because it helps doctors to know whether patients will respond positively to a drug before it is administered.
“The big deal with personal medicine is that no two people are alike and no two diseases are alike,” Vadas says.
“In cancer medicine, it means not having toxic drugs that you know will not help you. The selection of drugs to patients is genuinely exciting.”
The cutting-edge technology has had a personal impact on Vadas.
“My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer at age almost 90 . . . and because of personalised medicine they found a drug specifically for that [type of cancer], so she was able to take the right drug with very little toxicity,” he says. “Five years ago she’d either have taken something really toxic or be dead.”
Vadas says the technology is changing the business model for the pharmaceutical industry.
“Before, you made a drug and you had to give it to all 100 people and 30 people benefited, and you made 100 sales,” he says.
Personalised medicine can determine whether someone will respond positively to the treatment in advance. If only 30 people will benefit, the company will make only 30 sales.
“So the population you can sell the drug to has decreased, but the effectiveness of the people you sell to has increased,” Vadas says.
Dr Alan Taylor, a scientist and former investment banker, is now executive chairman of the Australian company Clarity Pharmaceuticals. Last month Clarity raised $1.1 million to further commercialise its personalised medicine companion diagnostic research.
Clarity developed the technology to tag an antibody and track where it goes in a patient’s body.
Australia has not had a great track record in commercialising science.
“If it binds to the cancer, that suggests the drug will be effective for that individual patient. If it doesn’t bind, the drug isn’t going to be effective,” Taylor says.
Two key benefits arise, he says. First, it increases safety and reduces cost by only treating patients with a drug that will be effective for them. Second, it increases the likelihood of drugs getting through clinical trials because the drug is only trialled on patients who are responsive to the drug.
Taylor invested $200,000 of his own funds in the $1.1 million capital raising. He began work as an investment banker after completing a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology and saw his main role as a banker to bring US life sciences companies to Australia. He would raise $80 million to $100 million to list them on the Australian Stock Exchange.
Then Taylor wanted to see more Australian science researchers become successful. “There were a couple of success stories on the Australian market, but quite frankly I was sick of hearing about ResMed and Cochlear. They’re fantastic companies but that was 20 years ago.
“Australia has not had a great track record in commercialising science.”
Taylor led the capital raising for Clarity, which was oversubscribed. “The reason it went so well is because Clarity is at the forefront of where medicine is going, and that is personalised medicine,” he says.
Dr Alex Vadas, managing director of the diagnostic and personalised medicine group L.E.K. Consulting in Los Angeles, gained a PhD in chemical engineering. He says personalised medicine heralds a sea change in research and is turning the global market on its head.
“It’s still very new,” he says. “Five years ago, a lot of people [in the pharmaceutical industry] were scratching their head, saying: ‘Do we really want to do this? It’s going to fragment our market. I’m used to making drugs for everybody. I don’t like the idea that there might be a test that will take patients off my addressable market’.
“But people are slowly realising that you can build a credible business in this area: ‘Wow, if our drug works many times better than another drug but in a very defined population, that’s an attractive proposition’.”
Most of the research taking place is with cancer drugs for late-stage disease, Alex Vadas says.
The global market for personalised cancer drugs in 2013 was $US19 billion to $US20 billion ($21.3 billion), he says, though the market was much smaller for the companion diagnostic tests associated with those drugs. “Probably a few hundred million worldwide,” he says.
The big business will come when personalised drugs and their companion diagnostic tests evolve from late-stage cancer to large chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease or Alzheimer’s, he says.
The potential for growth is enormous. “Right now we’re at the little brick stage,” he says. “We’re not even close to building the house.”