Shepherd returns to the flock

By SIMON COLLINS

An expatriate New Zealander is bringing home a new company that will use antibodies made in sheep to test the effects of drugs on humans.

Kaitaia-born Dr Peter Shepherd, a biochemistry professor at University College, London, teamed up with Timaru-based South Pacific Sera because Britain's foot and mouth disease outbreak two years ago made it too risky to make the antibodies in British sheep.

Now South Pacific Sera has taken a shareholding in Shepherd's new firm, Symansis, and he is negotiating a university job in Auckland.

He said Symansis would probably be based in Auckland because the city had the "critical mass" required for a biotech company in finance, law and intellectual property services.

Symansis will make the antibodies in sheep in the South Island and package them for use by pharmaceutical companies to test drugs for cancer, diabetes and other diseases.

The business will be small by world standards, aiming to raise $5 million in initial capital and employing 20 to 100 people eventually.

But it could be just a forerunner of other businesses, based on Shepherd's track record. He has already established one successful company, Xcellsyz, which grows human cells in a lab in Newcastle upon Tyne, again for use by drug companies wanting to test their drugs.

University College, London, put £500,000 ($1.4 million) into that firm under a British Government policy which encourages universities to commercialise their research discoveries. It now has a mix of public and private capital.

"We thought it would be better to test drugs on human cells than on rats," Shepherd said.

"So we set about taking cells from humans and making them live forever in a dish, so you'd have an endless supply of human cells.

"Normally cells have a finite lifetime, but cancer cells circumvent that and keep growing well beyond their normal potential.

"We developed a way to switch that immortality on and off, so that instead of acting like a cancer cell they behave like a normal human cell. We want them to grow like cancer cells but then stop."

Symansis (Greek for "to send a signal") aims to use antibodies to identify parts of the cell which are switched on or off by various drugs.

"Each specific antibody will recognise a different point and tell us whether it's on or off. You can look at all the hundreds of different points inside the cell and draw a map to see whether the different points in the network are on or off.

"It's a bit like looking from the sky to see all the traffic light signals in Auckland at one time to see which way the traffic's flowing. If you imagine we look down from the sky and there's an accident on the Southern Motorway and the traffic's backed up, you send people down to clear the blockage. That's a bit like what you do with a disease. You see where the problem lies and where you should aim your treatments."

Shepherd, 41, and his American wife believe New Zealand will be a great place to bring up their children, aged 6 and 8.

"I've tried as much as possible to keep up contacts here and in Australia and America," he said. He aims to tap those networks for investment in Symansis at the AusBiotech conference in Adelaide this weekend.