BioWorld International Correspondent

LONDON - The first Anglo-Japanese biotechnology company, IC-Vec Ltd., has been spun out from Imperial College London with £3.1 million (US$4.8 million) of Japanese venture capital and intellectual property from Mitsubishi Chemical Corp., Japan's largest chemical company.

IC-Vec was set up by Andrew Miller, director of the Genetic Therapies Centre at Imperial College, to commercialize work in liposome gene vectors that was funded by Mitsubishi.

Miller told BioWorld International, "In deciding how to exploit this research we negotiated with Mitsubishi to acquire back the intellectual property and establish a company around it. They agreed because we are the experts and have all the equipment to do this. We decided to go to venture capital investors in Japan because we want to go for longer-term commitment and Western venture capitalists are too short term in their thinking."

The two Japanese backers, Diamond Capital Corp. and Nikko Capital, have an option to double their initial investment in the next 18 months.

Miller said that gene therapy is gradually getting accepted, but a lot of venture capitalists got their fingers burned by being over-enthusiastic at the beginning. "However, in Japan, gene therapy took longer to get embedded in the culture, but is now being accepted."

In addition, Miller perceived that IC-Vec would have a particular problem raising money from Western venture capitalists because of its focus on liposomes, an approach to gene therapy that has been largely discounted because of stability problems with those vectors.

IC-Vec's technology, Liposome Mu DNA (LMD), packages the gene within a peptide (Mu) from the core of an adenovirus, which is then coated with a liposome. "Mu has a lovely combination of properties, including DNA templating," Miller said. "These vectors are considerably more stable than cationic liposomes, with none of the reproducibility problems, and we can modify the core or the surface of the particle."

The formulation is stable in biological fluids and is then triggered, releasing its payload in the cell. Miller said the vectors can take large payloads and would be capable of carrying synthetic chromosomes. The next stage will be to develop a means of targeting the vectors to the required cells, and Miller said that would be built into the triggering system.

IC-Vec will spend the next two years developing the platform technology and intends to go on to focus on cancer gene therapy. "We are already geared up to do this with cancer experts on our advisory board," Miller said. The company does not have any proprietary genes but intends to establish relationships with partners that do.

"We will be a gatekeeper to the gene therapy world," Miller said. "There is serious concern about using viruses to deliver genes. Viruses have a natural tendency to pathogenicity even if you attenuate them; it's what they are here for.

"On the other hand, clinical confidence in [the safety of] liposome vectors is high, but as yet the delivery technology is not good enough."