Protemix co-founders buy back assets

Two co-founders of failed biopharmaceutical company Protemix Corporation have bought the intellectual property assets from the liquidator in an open bidding process.

Garth Cooper, a Professor of Medicine, and his wife Margaret won't reveal what they paid but say they plan to resuscitate patents and other IP assets that have lain dormant since they quit the company in 2006, after Auckland businessman Bill Birnie took the helm.

Their aim is to get Protemix's key compound - Lazerin - registered in the United States for general use, a process Garth Cooper says could cost  up to US$100 million. 

Lazerin, a compound designed to treat diabetic heart failure, has already been given Investigation New Drug status by the US Food & Drug Administration, along with a rare fast-track award.

Protemix burned through about $41m, including a $13m government grant, after being founded in Auckland in 1998 by professors Cooper and John Baker, lawyer Tony Molloy and businessman Neville Jordan.

When Protemix collapsed into liquidation in June, it owed creditors $2.145m.

A last-ditch rescue package from former travel industry magnate Andrew Bagnall had been put to the company's 39 shareholders, including South Canterbury Finance's major shareholder Allan Hubbard,  but failed to get the required 90 per cent acceptance.

At that point Birnie says he had no option but to call in the liquidators.

The Protemix assets have been placed in a not-for-profit entity, PhilERA, "as part of a renewed focus to realise the health benefits envisaged at the time the programme was founded", Margaret Cooper says.

Diabetes affects about 250 million people worldwide and cardio-vascular disease is a leading cause of death a disability in these patients.

There is "largely no effective medicine", she says.

The Coopers paid liquidator Laurie Chillcott "less than you would think, presumably because the IP has not been worked for a number of years".

Research is not a linear process, she says, and much work is still to be done on understanding the position of the "old" IP in the structure of international research.

"It's a big hunkering-down process."

Garth Cooper says he can't reveal where the funding for new clinical trials might come from, except to say it is not yet in place.

Nor can he say where the research will be located. This will depend on funding but it is likely to be in the northern hemisphere.

 "We had hoped to have a viable pharmaceutical company here in New Zealand with limbs to the rest of the world," he says.

"I view the whole thing with a great deal of trepidation. But we felt we had a duty to try. I have been involved in doing things like this successfully before and I think this one has real potential."

Cooper was a founder of Amylin Pharmaceutials, a Nasdaq-listed company based in San Diego with a current market capitalisation of US3.07 billion.

His next job is to sort through more than 300 boxes of Protemix documents, stored in a lock-up in Glen Innes, and do due diligence and a review of the patents.

Chillcott could not be contacted for comment.

 

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