Tuesday, 9 October 2006
Mr Kyle Meetze, Commercialisation Leader, NeutroPharma
NeutroPharma has developed a therapy to boost the immune system of patients undergoing high dose chemotherapy that current therapies cannot target.
With 200,000 cancer patients hospitalised each year from life threatening infections, NeutroPharma has developed a way to replace damaged immune cells with healthy cells in patients where the immune systems are too damaged for existing treatments to be immediately effective.
The technology has been developed by researchers led by Professor Lars Nielsen at Australian Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (AIBN) at The University of Queensland (UQ), in collaboration with the Australian Red Cross Blood Service (ARCBS).
The therapy, known as Neutrophil Cell Therapy (NCT), will support the patients until their immune system recovers and other therapies can be effective.
While transfusions similar to this have been possible for nearly 30 years, access has been limited to patients with severe life-threatening infections, because matching donors and numerous doses with the right number of neutrophils per dose have contributed to a high cost and complex therapy.
NeutroPharma's NCT™ overcomes all of these problems and has created a treatment that can be used by all patients to support their immune system and avoid an infection in the first place.
Mr Kyle Meetze, the commercialisation leader of the NeutroPharma project, said that the process of pre-clinical scaling up and validation is going well.
"Everything is moving forward as expected with very positive results. The ARCBS, who originally identified the need for this product, is working closely with us to ensure that the product is safe." Mr Meetze said.
"We have also talked with clinicians down at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne who also said that if they had our NCT™ treatment available on demand it would be highly beneficial to treat high-risk chemotherapy patients before they developed an infection".
A finalist in UQ Business School's Enterprize competition, Mr Meetze sees the $100 000 business plan competition as essential to streamline NeutroPharma's business plan and pitch to help secure further funding from domestic and international venture capitalists.
"From the time we actually get substantial funding, we intend to be able to have this in clinical trials within 18 months," Mr Meetze said.
Other finalists are GetCracking (concrete roads will be cheaper to build and last longer), Imprezzeo (image recognition software), PepFactants (technology break-through for industries using emulsions and foams), BioShield (vaccine for a virus that has devastated the aquaculture industry globally), Ausonex (hearing test instrument that doubles speed of testing), and LanguageMap (cost-efficient way of testing English language skills).
To secure your place at Enterprize Pitch Day on Friday 13 October, contact Amy Hsylop a.hyslop@business.uq.edu.au
Media enquiries:
Cathy Stacey
Marketing Development Manager
Phone (07) 3365 6179
Mobile 0434 074 372
Fiona Sutton
Mobile 0423 637 699
Email media@business.uq.edu.au
