Coral Reefs to Clinical Trials: A Long and Bumpy Road

Academic natural products chemists excel at the discovery of novel secondary metabolites with promising pharmaceutically relevant bioactivities (pharmacognosy). Natural products have been and continue to be a major source of inspiration for the development of new drugs. Therefore, natural product discoveries can generate a lot of excitement around the possibility of turning the initial findings into a clinically useful drug. However, turning the inspirational lead compound into a drug is a daunting challenge that has a high failure rate. Ultimately, success or failure for even the best lead compound depends to a large extent on the ability to access the financial and scientific resources needed for clinical development. This is almost impossible within a normal academic environment. Nevertheless, a number of paths to marshalling these resources are available. These include accessing government programs such as the NIH RAID (Rapid Access to Interventional Development) program, licensing the technology to a major pharmaceutical company or a mid size biotech company, or starting your own biotech company. Our group at UBC has had experience with most of these possibilities. This lecture will focus on the experience of co-founding the startup biotech companies Aquinox Pharmaceuticals (http://www.aqxpharma.com/) and ESSA Pharma Inc. (http://essapharmaceuticals.com/) designed to take marine natural product discoveries from our academic research into clinical trials and hopefully into clinical use. The underlying science that led to both of these companies will be discussed along with some reflections on the significant challenges and opportunities facing startup companies.