The Australian scientists behind cancer-fighting biotech Cartherics
An Australian IVF pioneer and medtech leader have returned home to build a new biotech from the ground up, with a goal of fighting cancer. They have raised $30 million to date, and plan on raising another $20 million.
When two prominent Australian scientists looked at early stage biotech startups in Australia, they saw a very challenging environment and lost opportunities. The landscape was peppered with a lot of brilliant research projects - Australian biotech research is world-renowned - and yet most only attracted small seed funding, if any, before stagnating and losing momentum, or having their technology sold off to overseas companies.
Alan Trounson, a pioneer of IVF and embryonic stem cells in Australia and Ian Nisbet, also an experienced biotech leader, who both held significant medical positions in the US, decided a different approach was needed. They returned home to Australia to found Cartherics together, a biotech startup developing cell-based immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer.
“Our approach to Cartherics has been to really build a company, and that is different to pretty much everyone else's idea, locally. Most people go into it basically to flip a project. We've gone in to build technology and build a company,” says Nisbet.
It was while Trounson had been heading up the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, a multi-billion dollar US institute that was funded by Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was governor, when he saw the potential of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) therapy.
