Biotech Starpharma expects global biopharmaceutical firm AstraZeneca to move quickly to get a cancer drug under joint development into clinical trials and then onto market.
Starpharma has signed a licensing deal with AstraZeneca under which AstraZeneca will use Starpharma's drug delivery technology in the development and commercialisation of new cancer drug, followed by other compounds.
The licensing agreement could generate up to $180 million in signature and milestone payments for Starpharma in relation to the first product and up to $133 million for each subsequent product.
The jointly-developed products will also generate royalties for Starpharma.
Starpharma chief executive Jackie Fairley said the cancer targeted by the first product is confidential, but that it has attracted a lot of attention globally and is one in which AstraZeneca is particularly strong.
"AstraZeneca is looking to advance this candidate (product) extremely aggressively through development into the clinic and then through into the various clinical trials," Dr Fairley said on Tuesday.
"They are very keen to get this product advanced and into the market because they consider it to be a very exciting oncology drug."
Dr Fairley said she could not disclose much detail about the first drug candidate's development status, other than that there were formal studies to support moving it through to clinical studies.
"We are currently scaling up material, together with third parties that we work with in that area, scaling up material for those trials," Dr Fairley said.
She said the AstraZeneca deal was strategically very important for Starpharma, and paved the way for others with other big pharmaceutical firms.
Starpharma's drug delivery platform, which aims to deliver a drug to the right part of the body at the right time, is built around dendrimers, a synthetic nanoscale polymer that's highly regular in size and structure.
Those properties make dendrimers useful to the pharmaceutical and medical sectors as enhancements to existing products or as entirely new products.
Starpharama shares were 0.5 cents lower at 73.5 cents at 1146 AEST.
They soared more than 21 per cent on Monday after the AstraZeneca deal was announced.
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