Island Pharmaceuticals Ltd (ASX:ILA) CEO and managing director David Foster believes in the vital role of the biotech industry in harnessing science to deliver powerful outcomes that will have a positive impact on global health.
Foster’s mid-stage clinical drug development company is targeting the vast unmet need for a therapy to combat viral infections – sound familiar?
The company’s modus operandi is to repurpose an existing small molecule, with a clinical history and pre-tested safety profile, as an anti-viral drug to treat dengue fever.
In this article:
- Where science, business and the law meet
- Harnessing the power of translational science
- What reputational problem?
- Re-purposing a molecule to cut to the chase
- What makes a successful small cap biotech company?
Down the track, the company plans to trial its platform, ISLA-101, as a broad-spectrum preventative or treatment for a range of mosquito-borne infections including Zika, Yellow River Fever and West Nile.
“ISLA-101 is a very interesting molecule because it targets an interaction between a viral protein and a host protein, and several viruses have similar proteins – not only dengue, but other mosquito-borne viruses all have a similar pathway of infecting cells,” he said.
The utility of such a molecule is enormous. “Imagine needing to go into a region where these diseases are endemic and being able to take it as a preventative? This is what we’re planning for this particular molecule.”
Where science, business and the law meet
Foster has been at the critical juncture for biotech – the meeting point of technology, business and the law – for decades.
The Texas native became fascinated with translational science and the power of good ideas back in graduate school in the mid-1990s.
He was first set on this path when, as a student at UT Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas, a large biotech company, Genentech, collaborated with the lab he was working in on a project.
“It was fascinating for me to see first-hand, not just the basic research that we were doing in our lab, but the translational part where they were taking our discoveries and trying to advance those programs into therapeutic products to treat people,” he said.
“I became really enamoured with the biotech industry at that point and thought it was a phenomenal way to use science and basic research and move it into a company to develop drugs and to treat people. I was highly motivated by that.”
Unfortunately, at the time there was very little biotech work for a curious PhD graduate in Texas.
Undeterred, Foster moved to the San Francisco Bay area, went to law school and became a card-carrying patent attorney, developing a keen understanding of what makes biotech companies stand and fall in a challenging legal landscape.
“I was really fortunate as I had the opportunity to work at an extremely entrepreneurial law firm that happened to represent lots of emerging companies in an area that was truly a hotspot for biotech at that time,” said Foster.
“I cut my teeth working on IP strategies for emerging biotech companies and watched those companies grow and sometimes not grow. I learned a lot from failures as well as successes and I’ve seen both.”
During this time, Foster was able to observe, close up, what the movers and shakers were doing in the industry.
“I was fortunate to work with some great clients and witness management make very smart decisions in very competitive spaces,” he said. “As a lawyer, you’re able to advise on those decisions and lay out the risk but ultimately it’s up to the company to make that decision and live with the consequences.”
He saw some phenomenal success – but, as he put it, “sometimes the technology simply doesn’t work”.
“I hate to see any company fail, but some of the greatest lessons I learned were from the companies that failed very quickly.
“I learned a lot from these early failures, probably as much as I did from the long successes that I’ve seen.”
Harnessing the power of translational science
Foster was present at a key moment for the industry, while working in-house for Medarex, a company that had a platform for developing antibody therapeutics, and had developed a variety of important drugs, including ground-breaking, cancer-fighting checkpoint inhibitors.
“I sat between the vice president of R&D and the VP of intellectual property,” he said.
“The scientists were coming to me from one side and the business team from the other and sitting at that juncture was very exciting because I really am still a scientist at heart.”
“To touch a project that became an approved product that’s actually making a difference to people’s lives really was a game-changing experience for me and set me down the path of moving from the law firm to the company side of things.”
Foster enjoys connecting people with solutions. When he returned to Texas he had a well-trained eye for biotech opportunities and founded the thriving Bio North Texas (BioNTX), a regional life science trade association that fosters industry growth.
“I’m really proud of that, and it was through setting up that organisation that I met my Island Pharmaceuticals co-founder,” he said. “It’s nice to have come full circle, to have started this organisation that was designed to bring people together, and then to have met somebody and actually founded Island Pharmaceuticals.”
What reputational problem?
Foster is perplexed that an industry that does so much good seems to have a reputational problem – that ‘big bad pharma’ is still a believable trope in a post-COVID era. He thinks the sector may need to improve its messaging.
“I believe this is an industry where people get into it to do the right thing,” he said. “Of course, there is money to be made but scientists typically want to help people and that’s why they get into drug development.”
“COVID-19 was a perfect example of that. The pharmaceutical industry response to COVID saw companies come together, people join forces, people share technology and then rapid-fire came up with phenomenal solutions.”
There are similarities between the global COVID response and Island Pharmaceuticals’ chosen approach – the broad-spectrum antiviral Remsdesivir also started life as a repurposed molecule.
Re-purposing a molecule to cut to the chase
The power of using a re-purposed molecule, initially designed as a cancer therapeutic, is that it has been in the clinic for years and 40-plus clinical trials.
“Thousands of people have taken this drug, so it already has an established safety profile, and we have data that tells us it’s very effective at preventing dengue fever and other mosquito-borne viral infections, pre-clinically,” Foster said.
Because it’s a known quantity with a long history, ISLA-101 should be in the clinic soon, without starting from scratch and expending years and billions to develop it – a business model that Foster has seen trip up many companies.
“As a scientist, I love to see people doing ground-breaking research, but I also think a lot of early-stage companies need to focus on what set of experiments need to be done to get them to an inflection point,” he said.
“It’s about what is going to move the ball forward. And I think a lot of companies lose sight of that. The question should be ‘what do I need to do to get this drug into the clinic’.”
What makes a successful small cap biotech company?
As a CEO, Foster is cognisant of every dollar the company spends and says he is always trying to move the ball forward. This means aiming for success in clinical trials and achieving a therapeutic product to deliver value to investors.
“Be laser focused on what it is you’re doing as a company and don’t spend money outside of those areas,” he said.
Work with the best: “We’re really blessed with Island’s Scientific Advisory Board and Board of Directors. In the case of the board, they have extensive experience from the clinic, to running publicly traded companies, to raising capital and to getting drugs approved and commercialised,” Foster said.
“Likewise with our Scientific Advisory Board, we have renowned virologists, people who’ve developed drugs, and people who’ve run enormous clinical trials, including vaccine and anti-viral trials.”
In Island Pharmaceuticals’ case, the molecule repurposing strategy also makes it an unusually lean operation for a biotech.
“Many companies talk about their preclinical studies and screening – as a repurposing company we don’t need to do that.
“That work’s already been done – that’s other people’s data, money and time – and we get to rely on that and use it to advance our program and move rapidly into clinical trials.
“I think the elegance of our program is the efficiency with which we can get into the clinic and move to significant value inflection points for the company.”