Carbo loading

Look out the window and much of what you’ll see is made up of carbohydrates, a class of organic chemical that, in living things, plays roles in everything from the storage and transport of energy to the structure of cells. They’re everywhere: in the grass, the trees, even the extracellular matrix of animals.

“Really it’s logical that the chemistry of carbohydrates would be a big thing,” observes Dr Richard Furneaux, IRL’s General Manager of Industrial Biotechnologies, who spearheaded IRL’s carbohydrate capability back in the 1980s.

While at first this research was applied to the development of agrichemicals, in 1990 IRL began investigating the new field of glycotherapeutics or carbohydrate-based therapies. Led by Dr Furneaux and Dr Peter Tyler, the team’s goal was to develop carbohydrate compounds that would become the basis for new drugs to be used in humans.

“There are a huge number of applications for carbohydrate chemistry and the pharmaceutical opportunities are big ones,” says Dr Furneaux.

“That’s because we have a rapidly growing appreciation of the critical role that complex carbohydrates play in biological systems.”

The team’s research received a major boost in 1994 when a partnership was forged between IRL’s carbohydrate chemistry group and Professor Vern Schramm of the Department of Biochemistry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

This collaboration proved fruitful—and has since resulted in a range of promising new drug candidates to combat auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and gout, and to treat a range of cancers and infectious diseases.

Besides offering hope of new treatments for severe illnesses afflicting millions around the globe, the research is also generating significant revenue.

To date, it has returned multimillion-dollar licence maintenance fees and milestone payments and has the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars in returns should these drugs go to market.

IRL’s carbohydrate chemistry expertise is also paying dividends for New Zealand industry and the local economy. For example, in 2003, IRL licensed an efficient process for the manufacture of a speciality carbohydrate known as ManNAc to Palmerston North-based pharmaceutical intermediate manufacturer, New Zealand Pharmaceuticals (NZP). In the subsequent years, NZP fulfilled orders worth in excess of $10 million for the product.

Buoyed by this market success, as well as the pipeline of potential new products out of IRL’s laboratories and GlycoSyn facilities, NZP invested$10 million in a new factory in Palmerston North to produce glycotherapeutics, with support from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise and TechNZ, the FRST^[?] programme that supports R&D by firms.
 
With the completion of the NZP plant and the establishment of a core cluster of drug development companies in New Zealand, there is now an infrastructure for pharmaceutical development in this country.

Importantly this means New Zealand is now in the position to benefit from the hundreds of millions of dollars spent during the drug development process, says Dr Furneaux.

“If you can capture that spend here in New Zealand you are already getting benefit during the development phase, in addition to what happens when a drug gets to market. To do that you’ve got to have all the service providers in place."