Boston Bio-Relationships Conference 2007 - Bringing Biotech from Australasia to the United States

Life Synopsis:
Ian Frazer is Director of the Diamantina Institute of Cancer Immunology and Metabolic Medicine, a research institute of the University of Queensland at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. Ian trained as a renal physician and clinical immunologist in Edinburgh, Scotland before emigrating in 1981 to Melbourne, Australia to continue his clinical training and to pursue studies in viral immunology and autoimmunity at the Walter and Eliza Hall institute of Medical Research with Prof Ian Mackay. In 1985 he moved to Brisbane to take up a teaching post with the University of Queensland, and he now holds a personal chair as head of the Diamantina Institute.
The Diamantina Institute employs over 200 researchers and trains over 30 postgraduate students. Dr Frazer’s current research interests include immuno-regulation and immunotherapeutic vaccines, for which he holds research funding from several Australian and US funding bodies. Dr Frazer teaches immunology to undergraduate and graduate students of the University. He is on the board of the Queensland Cancer Fund, and is vice president of the Cancer Council Australia. He has sat on various committees of the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia continuously over the last 15 years. He advises the WHO on papillomavirus vaccines. He was chosen as the 2006 Australian of the Year.

Commercialisation:
Dr Frazer consults with a number of organisations on immunomodualatory drugs, prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines. He is a named inventor on patents relating to HPV prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines licensed to CSL, Merck and GSK, and on patents on DNA vaccines and on optimising therapeutic protein expression licensed to Coridon Pty Ltd. He sits on the board of two for-profit small biotech companies and a number of not-for-profit organizations.

Research Funding
Dr Frazer is the inaugural holder of the Queensland government Smart State premier’s fellowship, worth $2.5m over 5 years. Dr Frazer has held continuous research funding from the NHMRC since 1985, mostly relating to papillomaviruses or tumour immunology. He is currently a joint CI on an NHMRC program grant and a NHMRC/Wellcome program grant, together worth >$2m/year. He also holds competitive project grants from NHMRC, the Queensland Cancer Fund, and the Cancer Research Institute of New York.

Significant contributions to Biomedical Research
Since 1983, Dr Frazer has pursued an interest in development of vaccines to prevent human papillomavirus(HPV) infection and the 0.5m annual deaths from papillomavirus related human cancers in the cervix and elsewhere. In 1985, with colleagues in Melbourne, he demonstrated, at a time when the association of papillomavirus infection with cervical cancer was still contentious, that papillomavirus infection also contributed to anal precancer, particularly in men with immunosuppression as a result of HIV/AIDS. In 1990, he and his then postdoctoral scientist, Dr Jian Zhou, developed the technology for producing human papillomavirus virus like particles. This technology, licensed through the University of Queensland, is now the basis of vaccines recently brought to market by GSK(Cervarix) and Merck (Gardasil) to prevent cervical cancer.

The HPV vaccine is only the second vaccine to be produced using recombinant DNA technology, which was necessary because papillomaviruses could not be grown in cell culture. The development of HPV virus like particles was an early product of the application of comparative genomics, as sequence alignment for the genes for the major capsid proteins of a range of papillomaviruses showed that expression of the major capsid protein of the HPV16 virus from the second initiation codon in eukaryotic cells was likely to induce particle formation where conventional expression strategies had failed. Dr Frazer has also developed two different therapeutic vaccines for chronic HPV infection, one currently in Phase 2 clinical trials through CSL Ltd, an Australian Biotechnology company, and one in Phase 2 clinical trials in China and Brisbane with funding from the Cancer Research Institute of New York and The Wellcome Foundation. Dr Frazer has also developed a technology for improving the immune response to polynucleotide vaccines based on differential preferences for codon usage between cells of different lineages, which has been licensed to Coridon Pty Ltd and is currently being used to develop polynucleotide vaccines for Herpes viruses.