Biotech entrepreneur Hopper brings companies to life
Australian bioentrepreneur Paul Hopper at his Sydney home. Picture: Hollie Adams
Paul Hopper turned a company that was broke and valued at $4 million into a $500m target in less than nine years, so it’s not surprising the Australian life sciences entrepreneur says biotech is the “greatest industry to be in”.
The Sydney-based businessman has served as a founder, chairman, non-executive director or chief executive of more than 14 companies in the US, Australia and Asia, and says the $500m sale of cancer drug developer Viralytics to pharmaceutical giant Merck is easily his career highlight.
Mr Hopper, who chairs Viralytics, was in the Qantas lounge in Singapore the night the deal with Merck was announced in February, and he recalls it as an emotional moment.
“My wife asked if I was all right and I said ‘this is monumental’ — it was a fabulous feeling,” he says.
His modus operandi is to acquire technology in the cancer field, put it into a listed company, then join the board or become its chairman. He is the leading investor in several Australian cancer-focused biotechs.
One company he founded 10 years ago is now owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing and it is conducting one of the largest phase-three melanoma trials in the world.
“Biotech is the greatest industry to be in,” he says.
“When I come back from a trip my wife will ask me to tell her about the geniuses I met because I meet scientists who are peering into the origins of life, looking into the greatest scourge to mankind — cancer — and they are so inspirational.”
Cancer has long been on Mr Hopper’s radar and he has witnessed the field of immuno-oncology emerge at the forefront of innovative research.
He says that for decades there was a theory that instead of just hitting the cancer directly with a drug, cutting it out, poisoning it with chemotherapy or frying it with radiation, you could get the body’s immune system to kill the cancer. He adds that it was only about seven years ago, when Bristol-Myers’ drug Yervoy was approved, that the naysayers who said you couldn’t get an immune response to kill a cancer were silenced.
“That was when the immuno-oncology revolution took place,” he said.
“That is the focus of a lot of cancer drugs today: how do we switch the immune system on so that when it goes out on its surveillance program like a fighter, it doesn’t fly over the cancer — it says it’s something that is nasty.”
Combination therapies are the latest trend and have increased the interest in Viralytics. The Australian listed company combined a virus with a checkpoint inhibitor, which allows the immune system to wake up. Hopper says the checkpoint inhibitors really kicked off the immuno-oncology craze. Viralytics, which should complete its deal with Merck in five weeks, developed a drug called Cavatak which uses a formulation of a common cold virus that has been shown to preferentially infect and kill cancer cells. The drug is being tested in combination with Merck’s well-known cancer drug Keytruda for melanoma, prostate, lung and bladder cancers.
Mr Hopper says 10 years ago the idea of taking a virus and injecting it into a patient to cure cancer was “out there”, adding that Viralytics struggled for years to find its place in the sun.
“Darren Shafren, the scientific genius behind the drug, never wavered. He believed that one day there would be a drug where a virus hunts around the body, finds a cancer cell and kills it,” he said.
“The watershed event was five years ago when an American company got a virus drug, T-Vec, approved and suddenly the world changed and it became respectable. From there our life improved.”
The biotech entrepreneur adds that Australia’s biotech industry is maturing, noting that 10 years ago none of the big US funds were buying Australian stocks in that space but now kept them on a watch list.
He says a challenge in Australian biotech is finding good CEOs, which saw many companies appoint big pharma executives.
“I have a firm view based on a lot of bad experience that big pharma execs don’t translate to a good CEO of a small biotech,” he says.
He adds that an exception to his rule is Lesley Chong, the head of Imugene, an Australian listed drug developer that he chairs.
Mr Hopper is hopeful Imugene will follow the lead of Viralytics be globally recognised for its work in the cancer space.
Imugene’s work is centred on the HER 2 receptor, which is present in about 20 per cent of gastric and breast cancers. The company is developing a B-cell vaccine designed to stimulate a patient’s own immune system to produce antibodies to repeatedly attack the cancer.
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