Pacific Edge breaks through
The biomedical firm's cancer test is getting recognition offshore.
Friday, September 02 2011 || Features || BY Matt Philp
What do you call a gathering of 10,000 urologists? There’s a punchline there somewhere, but for David Darling, globetrotting CEO of Dunedin-based biomedical venture Pacific Edge, the answer is opportunity.
When Unlimited caught up with Darling in May he was at the annual convention of the American Urological Association with that 10,000 to promote Pacific Edge’s newly-licensed bladder cancer test called Cxbladder.
The urine-based test, which with a pipeline of other products was nine years and $18 million in the making, is touted as having the potential to revolutionise early detection of bladder cancer. For Pacific Edge launched a decade ago in what Darling calls “a ballsy move” to develop oncology diagnostics using the sequencing of the human genome as a platform it could be the start of very big things.
What makes Cxbladder so potentially valuable? Specialists currently rely on expensive and invasive bladder cancer tests such as cytology, used as an adjunct to cystoscopy. By contrast, says Darling, Cxbladder which works by searching for concentrations of a handful of specific biomarkers is relatively cheap, non-invasive and more accurate. “We expect it to completely replace cytology.”
This year the company inked a licensing deal for Cxbladder with Australia’s second largest private hospital and pathology provider Healthscope, which has 44 private hospitals and 48 clinics around Australasia and Asia and handles 65% of New Zealand’s diagnostic services.
Under the arrangement, Cxbladder tests done in Australia will be processed by Healthscope’s Melbourne lab, with the option for users to send samples to Pacific Edge’s newly fitted out molecular-based lab in Dunedin.
It also recently snared a deal with Oryzon SA which will exclusively license Cxbladder in Spain and Portugal.
There will likely be more agreements this year, but Darling savoured the Australian one because it was the company’s first income stream from Cxbladder after all those years of development spending. “You do take a deep breath at this point. It’s been a reasonably long row to hoe.”
Ten years, in fact, during which Pacific Edge has become a very different kind of enterprise than originally envisaged. When it launched in 2001
with New Zealand Seed Fund backing, the company was solely a biotech venture that aimed to use microarray technology developed by Otago researchers to find genetic biomarkers for cancers. The cornerstone of the company, its gene expression database, was produced during the first three years; the next two were devoted to mining it for potential prototype products.
“Each time we went out to the market we expected the larger diagnostic companies would pick it up,” says Darling. “But they said, ‘Why don’t you complete the testing, take it to market and then interact with us?’ So that’s what we did; we just kept moving up the value chain to the point where we owned the technology and have taken it all the way through to market in its commercial format. That’s a tremendous achievement for a small team like ours, to be versatile enough to traverse the zone from discovery to prototype development to validation, clinical testing and then to turn around and franchise it.”
