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TWST: Would you give us a brief overview and a short history of
Phytobiotech?
Dr. Archambault: Our company uses plant cell culture technology
to generate a library of purified phytochemicals for drug
discovery. I've been working in the area of plant cell culture
bioengineering for the last 17 years, and during that time we've
discovered a certain number of new approaches in this field that
allows us to induce secondary metabolite production from most
plant species. Secondary metabolites are small molecules made by
plants, not during their primary growth phase. So we're using
this technology to develop our library for drug discovery. We
raised our first-seed financing in 1998 and 1999 with local VCs,
and in May 2000, we raised C5.4 million and started our
activities. Initially, we built up our library of purified
compounds, which is now over 100,000 compounds. In early 2002, we
signed a number of collaborations to test a small part of our
library ' 10,000 compounds. Our first hits (active compounds)
were identified in the summer of 2002 and we are now purifying
and characterizing these hits . We raised 17.25 million in July
and September 2002 and we're moving ahead with our strategy,
which is to do our own drug discovery and development, accessing
biological targets from university or governmental organizations,
such as the NCI. We just signed an agreement with the National
Cancer Institute whereby they will test 100,000 of our compounds
over the next three years. As a company, we're focusing on cancer
and infectious diseases. TWST: Could you describe some of the alliances and partnerships
that you currently have?
Mr. Gauthier (VP Corporate Development): Our latest collaboration
and the one that is most exciting for us is a collaboration with
the National Cancer Institute in the US. As Jean said, over the
next three years, we will be testing a little over 100,000 of our
compounds in a number of NCI anti-infective and anti-cancer
screens. So we're looking forward to working with the NCI, as
they're probably the group that has done the most natural product
screening and development among all natural products groups in
the world.
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