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Brandon Capital and Aravax – tackling peanut allergy from a new direction
[Music starts. The video shows Pascal Hickey. He is seated in an office and speaking to the camera. His full name, and company name appear at the lower left-hand side of the screen. It states:
Pascal Hickey
Aravax, CEO]
Pascal Hickey: My name is Pascal Hickey; I'm the CEO at Aravax.
[The video changes to show Chris Smith. He is seated in an office with the Brandon Capital logo behind him and speaking to the camera. His full name, and company name appear at the lower left-hand side of the screen. It states:
Chris Smith
Brandon Capital, Partner]
Chris Smith: I'm Chris Smith. I work at Brandon Capital. I'm one of the partners here in the business.
[The video cuts to Pascal Hickey seated in an office in front of a computer as he is speaking.]
Pascal Hickey: Aravax is a Melbourne based biotechnology company developing next generation immunotherapies for the treatment of allergic disease.
[The video cuts to the Brandon Capital logo on a white wall and then shifts to Chris Smith seated. He is speaking to the camera].
Chris Smith: Brandon Capital and the Medical Research Commercialisation Fund is a venture capital firm for investing in life sciences developed here in Australia.
Chris Smith: Our job is to try and find good ideas, the next future medicines that might treat humanity and really try and develop those, get them out of early stage research and get them into development and human clinical testing and then for medicines that we can all use.
[Camera cuts to Chris Smith and Pascal Hickey walking through an office hallway. Chris and Pascal then sit down together in an office meeting area.]
Pascal Hickey: So back in 2017, Aravax had completed the early stage research that led to the identification of the lead product, PBX 108.
[Camera cuts back to Pascal Hickey seated in an office. He is speaking to the camera.]
Pascal Hickey: That stage of development is when some really significant costs start to come in. Aravax needed to commit to startup costs associated with the clinical trials and also needed to fund the costly toxicology studies that are required by the regulators before we can go into humans for the first time.
[The video changes back to Chris and Pascal seated in an office meeting area.]
Pascal Hickey: At that stage, the BTF support became critical for Aravax's progression.
[Camera cuts back to Chris Smith seated in an office, with the Brandon Capital logo behind him. He is speaking to the camera.]
Chris Smith: I worked with the founders for probably 2 years before we made our first investment, really trying to shape that into a product and think about what that might look like. The experience investing in the biomedical field is fantastic. It's an amazing place to be. It's a privileged place to be, challenging from lots of different angles, but also really enjoyable as well.
[The video changes back to Pascal Hickey seated in an office. He is speaking to the camera.
The video cuts to Pascal Hickey working on a computer.]
Pascal Hickey: What we've seen over the last 10 to 20 years is that small to medium biotech companies are playing a much greater role in taking that science, understanding the needs and wants of patients around the world and developing medicines to a later stage of development and in some cases even going all the way and commercialising those products themselves.
[The camera cuts to Chris Smith seated in an office with the Brandon Capital logo behind him. He is speaking to the camera.]
Chris Smith: The BTF programme is significant for advancing biomedical innovation in Australia.
[Video cuts to footage of Chris Smith and Pascal Hickey engaged in conversation in a professional office setting.]
Chris Smith: I think without it, we’d be in a very different position. I think one of the most significant impacts has been to keep companies like Aravax developing these products.
[Camera cuts to Pascal Hickey. He is seated in an office and speaking to the camera. The video then cuts to Chris Smith and Pascal Hickey walking through an office hallway while engaged in conversation.]
Pascal Hickey: The development program for PVX 108 to date has created so many roles in clinical research, clinical science, clinical trials administration.
[As Pascal Hickey speaks, the screen shows bustling city streets filled with crowds, a view of Melbourne’s Flinders Street Railway Station.]
Pascal Hickey: But in addition to that, there are the people that are required to support this, this very large project, the accountants, the lawyers, the patent attorneys.
[Video cuts back to Pascal Hickey speaking to the camera.]
Pascal Hickey: The majority of these roles are being created and supported within the vendors that provide the Research Services that we use, but all of those activities are managed by a relatively small but very highly experienced core Aravax management team that's based here in Melbourne.
[Video cuts back to Chris Smith seated in an office with the Brandon Capital logo. He is speaking to the camera.]
Chris Smith: If the BTF didn't exist, there's companies and technologies and potential medicines that would never exist, which would be a real shame from the perspective of Australian innovation.
And we've seen that in the past and we want, we want to try and really build the industry here. And so the BTF has been critical for that.
[Music ends]
[Video ends with a final blue panel showing the Australian Government, Department of Industry, Science and Resources crest and logo in stack format at the top left of the screen.
It states: The Australian government Department of Industry, Science and Resources is delivering the Biomedical Translation Fund on behalf of the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
This URL also appears at the bottom left: business.gov.au/grants-and-programs/venture-capital.]
Overview
- Brandon Capital is one of 3 private equity partners in the Australian Government’s Biomedical Translation Fund (BTF).
- Aravax is developing disease-modifying treatments for food allergies, based on original research from Alfred Health and Monash University.
- Support from Brandon Capital through the BTF has enabled Aravax to progress its PVX108 peanut allergy candidate to an international Phase 2 clinical trial.
About Brandon Capital
Brandon Capital is a leading life science venture capital firm with offices in Melbourne, Sydney, San Francisco and London. Its BioCatalyst fund focuses on seeding early-stage biomedical innovations.
Through the BTF, Brandon BioCatalyst (MCRF-BTF Fund) has invested $12.9 million into Aravax’s PVX108 project.
Australia is a globally recognised producer of research, but turning novel research into a therapy with the potential to improve lives takes investment. The BTF is plugging that investment gap. Without the commercialisation funding, research won’t make it out of the lab.
Aravax and research into a treatment for peanut allergy
Peanut allergy is a rapidly growing problem worldwide, causing serious and sometimes life-threatening reactions that currently cannot be predicted or prevented. Sufferers need to be constantly vigilant about accidental ingestion, which places stress on them and on their families and carers.
Aravax was founded in 2015 to refine and commercialise a new form of peptide immunotherapy developed by researchers at Alfred Health and Monash.
Aravax has identified the key fragments of the allergen that are critical for immune recognition and memory, and engineered peptides (PVX108) that mimic these fragments. An injection of PVX108 is designed to reprogram immune cells to tolerate the allergen. This approach has the potential to produce a safe, sustained treatment effect reducing the risk of reaction.
How investment from Brandon Capital has helped
Brandon Capital first learned about the research into PVX108 through Alfred Health, a Brandon BioCatalyst member. The Aravax founding team had been looking for funding for more than a year. They had a potential candidate ready to go into clinical trials but not the money to conduct them. At that time there were very few options for life sciences venture capital in Australia.
Seed funding from Brandon Capital enabled them to license the intellectual property, set up Aravax and run phase 1 clinical trials in Australia. The data these trials produced was the catalyst for bringing additional investment from both Australian and overseas venture capital.
Following the successful phase 1 safety trials, PVX108 received clearance from the US Food and Drug Administration, the key regulator, for phase 2 clinical trials in the US. In January 2023 Aravax completed a Series B funding round with US$42 million to fund the expansion of the phase 2 trials.
We are at the forefront globally in terms of producing the next generation of immunotherapy. Without the early support from the BTF we wouldn’t be where we are today. It was the key to enabling us to produce the data we needed to secure additional local and international investment.
As well as potentially freeing peanut allergy sufferers and their families from constant fear and preventing devastating reactions, the commercial success of PVX108 would:
- increase company-building capabilities in the Australian biotech sector
- give Australians early access to innovative therapies
- create research and clinical trial jobs.
Aravax’s success will encourage other Australian biotechnology researchers and companies to pursue commercialisation from Australia.
Australia produces amazing research and we want to see more of it turned into therapies that save lives and improve wellbeing globally.
Biomedical Translation Fund
Developing biotechnology into a viable product is a long and uncertain process. By setting up the BTF on a co-investment model, the Australian Government has provided a way for venture capital firms to invest in cutting-edge Australian biotechnology at an earlier stage than would normally be possible. For research-based startups, this is a game-changer.
The BTF has been critical for catalysing venture capital. That funding has enabled research to produce more candidates for commercialisation, which has brought in more investors and experienced people. More people from overseas are coming back to Australia because the biotech sector has matured.
Without the initial BTF funding, Aravax would not be where it is today.
More information
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Visit the Brandon Capital website.
Brandon Capital -
Visit the Brandon BioCatalyst website.
Brandon BioCatalyst -
Visit the Aravax website.
Aravax -
Find out more about the Biomedical Translation Fund.
Biomedical Translation Fund