James Cook University has formed its first spinout, Paragen Bio, which will commercialise autoimmune disease therapies derived from a blood-sucking tropical parasite.

Paragen Bio, an Australia-based autoimmune disease therapy spinout from James Cook University (JCU), secured A$6m ($4.4m) yesterday from investors including Australian government-backed Medical Research Commercialisation Fund (MRCF). AbbVie Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of biopharmaceutical firm AbbVie, also supplied cash, as did Australian government-backed Healthcare Fund III, managed by VC firm OneVentures. MRCF is managed by Brandon Capital and focuses on early-stage development of technologies emerging from Australia’s medical research institutes and affiliated research hospitals. Paragen Bio is working on treatments for autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, which cause the patient’s immune system to attack healthy tissues and organs. The approach relies on the thesis that autoimmune diseases have become more prevalent with the decline of infections from hookworm, a blood-sucking tropical parasite which had prospered in poor sanitary conditions before modern changes in lifestyle. The spinout has conducted clinical experiments interpolating patients with a protein extracted from hookworm saliva to prevent the onset of inflammatory symptoms.  Paragen will use the capital to move into initial stages of development on hookworm-derived medications for autoimmune diseases. Paragen spun out from JCU’s Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine having been co-founded by three of its researchers – Alex Loukas, John Miles and Paul Giacomin. The company is JCU’s first spinout. The trio were aided by Norelle Daly, a research fellow at JCU who works closely with Loukas’s research group. Alex Loukas, head of research at Paragen, said: “Autoimmune diseases are reaching epidemic proportions in developed countries and there is an urgent need for new therapeutic approaches. “At Paragen Bio we’re being guided in our drug discovery efforts by millennia of co-evolution between parasitic hookworms and their mammalian hosts, and in particular the effect hookworms can have on our immune systems.”

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