BresaGen in Adelaide adds stem cell therapy applied to disease, making strong links in the USA in early 2000s
In 1999, Adelaide biotechnology company BresaGen took on the stem cell research of professor Peter Rathjen, head of Adelaide University’s biochemistry department and chair of BresaGen’s scientific advisory committee,with the university’s commercial arm Luminis funding it up to $6.2 million over three years.
Stem cell research was a belated part of the pitch in the 1999 Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares in what became Adelaide’s BresaGen (formerly Bresa/Bresatec) biotech company.
In 1999, the company prepared an IPO prospectus to raise $12 million for research and development by promoting itself as concentrating on cell therapy and protein work. It had main projects were the-then promising E21R drug for treating leukaemia, the equine growth hormone EquiGen on the market, and a team looking to produce the world’s first biogeneric.
But brokers and underwriters said BresaGen’s story wasn’t “sexy enough”. So the IPO prospectus was rewritten to highlight stem cell research, bringing in the work of professor Peter Rathjen. Rathjen headed Adelaide University’s biochemistry department and chaired BresaGen’s scientific advisory committee while closely aligned with other executives: managing director John Smeaton and chief scientist Allan Robins.
BresaGen took on Rathjen’s stem cell research, with university’s commercial arm Luminis funding it up to $6.2 million over three years. Although speculative, this positioned BresaGen as an early leader in the embryonic stem cells field, starting to be recognised as a medical tool to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, diabetes and heart failure.
In November 2000, BresaGen bought CytoGenesis, a company focused on cell therapy products to treat Parkinson’s disease. BresaGen gained technologies being developed to accurately deliver cells into the human brain and to monitor the wellbeing of transplanted cells. CytoGenesis also gave BresaGen access to medical device and brain imaging for the cell-based treatment of neurodegenerative disease. It also enabled BresaGen to set up laboratory operations in the United States of America (USA) with an enticing deal from Georgia University in Atlanta.
In December 2000, BresaGen activated an Australian government $4,928,550 R&D (research and development) Start grant for cell therapy research over three years. By the middle of 2001, BresaGen had filed 13 patent families. In May 2001, BresaGen signed a research agreement with Stanford University for radiologists Drs Michael Moseley and Dan Spielman, to develop an image-guided cell delivery device to monitor metabolism after cells were transplanted into the brain of patients with Parkinson’s disease.
BresaGen announced in July 2001 it had derived four human embryonic cell lines – something not allowed in Australia. When USA president George Bush announced that only embryonic stem cell lines isolated before August 9, 2001, would get federal government funding, BresGen was one of the few eligible.
BresaGen, still run from Adelaide, added two USA directors, John Kucharczyk and Rudy Mazzocchi, a businessman and neuroradiology expert who added to the American technical benefits. With stem cell therapy showing it could be effective in treating traumatic spinal cord injury and stroke, as well as neuro-degenerative disorders, BresaGen aimed to ramp up its catheter and imaging programmes. It made a manufacturing and marketing agreement with Image-Guided Neurologics (IGN) to produce and distribute a specialised catheter intended to delivery stem cells into the brain. This had the potential to treat neurological diseases, including the USA’s two million Parkinson’s patients.
BresaGen had the exclusive licence to commercialise the IGN device and would test the cell delivery catheter in pre-clinical sponsored research at Stanford, Toronto, Minnesota and Virginia universities. BresaGen chief executive John Smeaton, said the agreement with IGN that had “an outstanding reputation for producing high-quality medical devices”, would significantly extend BresaGen’s cell delivery development programme.
