University of Queensland stamps its class as global leader in research

THE University of Queensland’s commercialisation company, UniQuest, is rated in the top 10 bodies of its kind globally, rivalling similar entities at Oxford and Harvard.

UniQuest chief executive Dean Moss (left) and executive director Mark Ashton.

IT started with a desk, a telephone and seed funding of $155,000. More than three decades later, the University of Queensland’s commercialisation company, UniQuest, is rated in the top 10 bodies of its kind globally, rivalling similar entities at Oxford and Harvard.

Since it began in 1984, UniQuest has licensed UQ technologies that have amassed $US15.5 billion ($A19.3 billion) in gross product sales, including Ian Frazer’s celebrated cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil.

But UniQuest chief executive Dean Moss insists it is not a one-hit wonder, also boasting the commercialisation of Matt Sanders’ Triple-P parenting program, image-correction technology used in most of the world’s magnetic resonance imaging machines and a new treatment for chronic pain among a growing portfolio of success stories.

More than 80 start-up companies have been created and $600 million has been raised to take University of Queensland technology to market.

In the past 15 years, UniQuest has returned more than $435 million in revenue to the university, much of it ploughed back into research and intellectual property protection.

So successful has it been the UK Science Minister Jo Johnson recently told Britain’s higher education leaders they could learn from UniQuest’s example.

He noted the $30 million a year it generates for UQ from intellectual property is more than any Russell Group university – a representative body for 24 leading UK universities.

Coming from the other side of the world, Mr Johnson’s praise for UniQuest, which employs a team of 70 people, challenges the mantra: “Australia’s great at research but we aren’t that great at commercialisation”.

Dr Moss and UniQuest’s executive director of IP commercialisation, Mark Ashton, visibly cringe at any mention of Australia being woeful at profiting from its scientists’ research, given UQ’s success.

“In terms of the Australian context, UniQuest generates more income than all of the other Group of 8 universities combined when it comes to commercialising research,” said Dr Moss, referring to the coalition of Australia’s leading universities.

“That’s how far ahead UniQuest is from the rest of Australia. In the Asia-Pacific region, we’re easily the largest university commercialisation entity and worldwide, we’re in the top 10.”

Hoping to build on that success, UniQuest has forged a partnership with Emory University in Atlanta to plug a huge hole in drug development. The result is the Queensland Emory Drug Discovery Initiative (QEDDI), which has been backed by a $4 million funding commitment from the Palaszczuk Government.

Through QEDDI, UniQuest has forged a relationship with one of the most successful medicinal chemists in the world, Emory University’s Dennis Liotta, who has been involved in the development of a dozen drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.

More than 90 per cent of patients being treated for HIV receive a drug discovered in Professor Liotta’s laboratory at Emory. Queensland Science Minister Leeanne Enoch said QEDDI would help fast-track drug therapies for some of the world’s most pressing health problems.

“The Palaszczuk Government recognises that translating research into clinical trials and taking it through to market can take decades and has a high attrition rate,” she said. “This partnership seeks to facilitate and speed up the commercialisation process – from the lab to the marketplace – for pioneering medical discoveries in Queensland.”

QEDDI, which has a staff of 18 medicinal chemists from throughout the world, will allow UniQuest to take key findings by UQ scientists about disease processes and translate that research into the development of molecules to be tested as potential drugs.

The big hope is it will allow UQ to retain a bigger portion of the value of its research.

“It’s a specific skill set to be able to do drug discovery and development,” Dr Ashton said. “That’s not taught in universities. You gain expertise from real life experience typically found in an industry setting. We’ve had to go interstate and globally to recruit people with the skills we required. It’s a really unique team in Australia.”

Professor Liotta, together with some pharmaceutical company executives, sits on an international advisory panel to help decide which drug target projects QEDDI works on.

Dr Ashton said projects already underway included potential drug candidates to treat cancer and neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

“This university is very strong in areas such as inflammation, immunology and brain disease,” he said.

UQ scientist Kate Schroder, who leads the Inflammasome laboratory at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, said that without UniQuest and QEDDI, she would lack the opportunity to translate her research into potential new drugs.

Associate Professor Schroder works on the molecular mechanisms that underlie inflammation, responsible for driving a myriad of human diseases. The hope is that by working with QEDDI’s medicinal chemists and biologists, she will be able to turn her knowledge of how inflammation develops in the body into new medicines to combat a range of illnesses, but particularly fatty liver disease.

“It’s a terrific opportunity for me and for my lab to collaborate with people who’ve got all of the in-house know-how to make drugs and to develop them further,” she said. “Even if I had the funding to do drug discovery, I don’t have the expertise.

“It’s a great motivator to be able to take something you know from basic science and try and translate it to see the impact on patients.”