Discovery centre will help to turn scientific discoveries into new drugs

BREAKTHROUGHS in the lab now have the chance to be tested in patients sooner and get onto the pharmacist shelf quicker, following the launch of an Australian-first drug discovery centre.

A $32 MILLION “drug discovery” centre in Melbourne will speed the process of transforming breakthroughs in the laboratory into tried and tested treatments for patients.

The Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research is using royalties from an anti-cancer drug Venetoclax to set up the Australia-first centre in Parkville.

Venetoclax, the development of which was based on research at the institute, is now “melting away” cancer cells in patients around the world.

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Director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, Professor Doug Hilton. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Institute director Professor Doug Hilton said the centre, which would replicate the first steps taken by a pharmaceutical company to produce medicines, would pave the way to develop treatments unprofitable for those companies, such as drugs for rare conditions.

The drug development could be financed by charities, or by crowd-funding.

“The pharmaceutical industry is constrained by the sorts of risks it can take,” Prof Hilton said. “They’re going to work on diseases that have a large market.

“Many devastating diseases, or conditions that affect people in the Third World, don’t affect enough people or aren’t going to be big (enough) money-makers to get the pharmaceutical industry excited.

“We think there is a real role for academic organisations to start the drug discovery process,” he said.

More than 100 clinical trials now under way are based on discoveries at the institute.

The Parkville centre will have specialist staff and robotics gear, equipping it to test millions of potential protein “hits” — the crucial starting point for drug development.

More than 100 clinical trials now under way are based on discoveries at the institute.

Prof Hilton said the institute was calling on state and federal governments to match its investment so the centre could be opened to scientists from around the country.

“Some of them (ideas) are going to come off, some of them won’t, but we want anyone with a good idea to take those risks a little more easily,” Prof Hilton said.

Dr Krystal Evans, chief of BioMelbourne Network, an association of Victorian medical and healthcare organisations, said the centre would make the difficult leap from research to development easier.

“It will create an expectation that researchers won’t just make discoveries, they will actually put them into a pipeline … to the patient.

“Operating at such a scale, it will develop a huge amount of interest from industry partners,” Dr Evans said.

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