Queensland Government funds international drug discovery alliance

An international project using exotic wildlife to find cures for prostate cancer and other fatal diseases has received major Queensland Government funding.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has today announced that $1.53 million Smart Futures Fund grant to support a new $6.2 million Queensland-British Columbia Drug Discovery Alliance between Griffith University’s Eskitis Institute, the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre, and two British Columbia research centres -- the Centre for Drug Research and Development and the Vancouver Prostate Centre.

The breakthrough project’s ultimate goal is to discover and commercialise the next generation of drugs from natural products drawn largely from Queensland’s tropical regions.

Eskitis Institute Director Professor Ron Quinn said this was an exciting partnership that brought together complementary expertise to unlock the hidden medicinal resources in our environment.

“Our aim is to use cutting-edge science and technology to uncover nature’s untapped resources and use them for the benefit of the global community,” Professor Quinn said.

Since 1993, the Institute has built Nature Bank, a collection containing more than 200,000 optimised natural product fractions derived from a collection of more than 45,000 samples of plants and marine invertebrates collected from mega-diverse areas of tropical Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef, Tasmania, Papua New Guinea and China.

The process of finding a new drug against a chosen target for a particular disease involves high-throughput screening (HTS), wherein large libraries of chemicals are tested for their ability to modify the disease target, followed by intensive chemistry effort to isolate the active compound.

“Using high throughput robotics for speed, CDRD and Eskitis will identify novel drug-like compounds from Nature Bank’s natural product extracts for these disease targets.” Partnering with the CDRD has for the first time opened up access to high quality disease targets from British Columbia’s health research community,” Professor Quinn said.

The other Alliance members, the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre (Queensland) and the Vancouver Prostate Centre are supplying prostate cancer targets, one of the leading causes of death in the western world. These targets will be screened at Eskitis using a breakthrough analysis method that can observe compounds interacting with proteins in real time.”

“Once identified, these compounds will be developed into potential drugs by the alliance members.”

Professor Quinn said naturally-occurring biological products were a better ‘fit’ with biology of the human body than many synthetic substances, and were still the main medicines used by 80 per cent of the world's population.