INTERVIEW - Spain's Zeltia farms the sea for cancer drug
Date: 13-Jul-00
Country: SPAIN
Author: Julia Hayley
Spanish biotechnology company Zeltia has four underwater farms where it is cultivating ecteinascidia turbinata - an invertebrate that lives in grape-like clusters and provides the raw material for its most advanced anti-cancer drug ET-743, Zeltia chairman Jose Maria Fernandez said yesterday. That drug, now in phase two of clinical trials, should be on the market in 2002, taking Zeltia's annual sales to around $1.5 billion from less than $50 million now, he said.
Zeltia has just completed a share swap, giving it 99.1 percent control of its biotech unit PharmaMar - which is developing the marine compounds - and a 250-million-euro ($237 million) capital expansion to fund the cost of getting its first drugs to market.
Expectations that its cancer treatments will be a commercial success have fired demand for Zeltia shares, making it the best performer on the Spanish market for the last three years. The stock has risen 40-fold since January 1998.
"We've asked investors for financing to get ET-743 to the market and we think we can achieve this at the end of 2002," Fernandez said in an interview.
Zeltia plans to market ET-743 in Europe and is in talks with five multinational pharmaceutical companies about licensing one of them to sell the product in the United States.
MOLLUSKS PROVE BETTER THAN MUSHROOMS
The success rate with testing marine plants and animals for medicinal use is far higher than that achieved on land, said Fernandez, himself a professor of biochemistry and keen scuba diver.
"On land, one in 10,000 samples produced something new so we decided to look underwater where 1.7 percent of marine samples prove active," he said.
Zeltia's other three advanced drugs are based on a mollusc from Hawaii, a North Atlantic clam and a micro-organism found off Mozambique. More compounds are in the pipeline.
Despite the boom in its share price, Zeltia has not been approached by any potential predators wanting to buy the company, said Fernandez, whose family still controls 40 percent of Zeltia shares.
The company has no debt, and nearly all the new cash it has raised is going into marketing the drugs.
"We have two products in clinical trials now but by this time next year it could be four and when they get into phase two of trials the development costs multiply," Fernandez said.
ET-743 could be approved to treat sarcomas (cancers of the bone, muscle and other supporting tissues) as soon as 2002 because there are few alternative treatments. It will probably take two years longer to win approval in the United States and Europe for use against breast cancer because there are existing drugs available such as Bristol-Myers Squibb's Taxol.
"Aplidina may enter phase two at the end of this year or beginning of next," said of another drug now in clinical trials. "It is proving surprisingly effective against kidney, bone marrow and thyroid cancer."
PharmaMar has developed synthetic compounds based on all these, but a man-made version of ET-743 will take longer and it will continue to employ divers to harvest the creature from its underwater farms for at least another two years.