Business View - February 2015 125
Given that reality, Bacha said, the concept behind the
company was to go back and reconsider drugs that
may not have been fully developed, but had shown
documented efficacy in different tumor types and had
been well-studied by an entity like the National Can-
cer Institute. That way, DelMar’s personnel could take
something they knew was active and modernize their
understanding of its biology and mechanics to the
point where the drug might fill one of the gaps in the
context of care.
“If so,” he said, “then we’re starting well down the field
in terms of getting toward the goal line, because a lot
of the animal work had been done, a lot of the toxic-
ity work had been done, maybe Phase I clinical trials
had been completed. And in many cases, some Phase
II clinical work, so evidence of clinical activity in man
against that type of cancer is already there.”
Ideally, that new-found knowledge would be quickly
leveraged to a point where it could do something for
patients and, in Bacha’s words, “unlock the value” of
a compound that had been left on the shelf.
The business model emerged as an add-on to “Lipin-
ski’s rule of five,” a process articulated in 1997 that
served as a litmus test for evaluating whether a chem-
ical compound with certain pharmacological/biologi-
cal activity would be an orally active drug in humans.
Brown took that set of rules and overlaid another set of
screening criteria for cancer drugs, and, upon encoun-
tering existing compounds whose developments had
been halted, discovered that many of them showed
promise.
Ultimately, when the industry began veering away
from traditional chemotherapies and toward antibody-
based and targeted therapies, there were a handful
of new substances available that answered Brown’s
“What does a good cancer drug look like?” question –
leaving only the biological and mechanistic research
to do before the drug could be brought to market.
Brown used the process on several projects while serv-
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
DelMar Pharmaceuticals
WHAT:
CPharmaceutical company formed in
2010 to develop and commercialize proven can-
cer therapies in new orphan drug indications
where patients are failing modern targeted or
biologic treatments
WHERE:
Administrative offices in Vancouver, B.C.;
Research/clinical operations in Menlo Park, Calif.
WEBSITE
:
HEALTHCARE
