Cancer-fighting compound found

One of the nation's top research institutes announced yesterday it had reached a deal to license out a cancer fighting compound extracted from a Chinese herbal medicine, in the hope a private company backed by Koo's Group (和信集團) can take it through the clinical trials necessary to bring it to market.

Officials said the compound, extracted from the herb Shan Fang Feng (山防風) or Echinops grijisii, may offer a breakthrough in drug research, but cautioned that years of further testing would be necessary before it could be called a medicine.

"This is a drug lead, not a drug," said Johnsee Lee (李鍾熙), general director of the Biomedical Engineering Center at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI, 工研院). "Further study is needed before it becomes a real medicine.

"It's not Chinese medicine. It's a compound that we've isolated and extracted from herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine. The compound is what we're working on as a drug lead," he said.

ITRI, a publicly funded R&D center based in Hsinchu, said it has passed the torch for its research into the cancer-fighting compound to the Taiwan-based Synpac-Kingdom Pharmaceutical Co (景德製藥), which is wholly owned by Taiwan-based Koo's Group, a large, family-run conglomerate.

Leslie Koo (辜成允), chairman of Synpac-Kingdom, said the company has the financial assets to see the compound through the testing stages.

The fight against cancer became personal for the Koo family after the passing of Chester Koo (辜啟允), 49, in December as a result of cancer of the gall bladder. Chester Koo and his father, the 84-year-old Koo Chen-fu (辜振甫), jointly resigned from the board of China Life Insurance Co (中國人壽), on Dec. 5, shortly before the younger Koo passed away.

Synpac-Kingdom officials say it could take up to eight years to finish all levels of testing. Over the next three years, the company will spend around NT$33.5 million (US$1 million) on pre-clinical drug trials, including testing the cancer fighting compound on animals, according to Eric Chiou (邱翼聰), senior vice president at Synpac.

Research on the compound was the result of a decade-long collaboration between ITRI, the National Taiwan University Hospital, and two research centers in the US, one at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, and another at the National Cancer Institute.

Together, these groups brought the compound to a level of purity that makes it ready for clinical testing.

Synpac-Kingdom will pay a licensing fee to ITRI for its research. If the compound becomes a medicine in the future, all parties involved in research will be paid licensing fees, Lee said.

The research center decided to license out the technology in order to move it forward a step, as ITRI does not conduct clinical testing.

Synpac-Kingdom is 100 percent owned by the Koo's Group, in large part through its subsidiary China Synthetic Rubber Corp (中國合成橡膠), which owns 95 percent of the biotech company, Chiou said.

Synpac-Kingdom has also invested in a UK-based drugmaker Penicillin G.