New drugs aim to treat and manage neuropathic pain

A finalist in The University of Queensland Business School’s Enterprize competition, Spinifex is in the running to win $100,000.

Spinifex will go head to head with seven other outstanding finalists at Enterprize Pitch Day on Friday, October 14 at the UQ Centre, Union Road, St Lucia at 4pm.

Pitch Day is the culmination of months of intensive work for finalists in the competition, and it is their chance to pitch a great business idea to a team of expert judges and an invited audience.

Spinifex Pharmaceuticals Pty Ltd has already raised AUD$3.25 million to explore treatments targeting a new neuropathic pain pathway recently discovered by researchers at The University of Queensland.

CEO Dr Michael Thurn said Spinifex had a solid intellectual property position with several drug candidates under evaluation.

“The results to date in preclinical models of neuropathic pain have been very promising,” he said.

“Spinifex hopes to advance one of those drug candidates to Phase II clinical trials before partnering with a large pharmaceutical company to complete drug development and registration for human use.”

Dr Thurn said every dollar of funding was welcomed because of the high costs of drug development.

“We also hope that participating in Enterprize will raise the profile of Spinifex in Australia – ultimately leading to further capital investment,” he said.

The other finalists are Trapforce (capturing greenhouse gases from industrial emissions), Reperfusion (cardiac therapeutic treatments), L.E.O. Tuning (active mapping engine control system), Hydrexia (new hydrogen storage technology), Casual Employment (software to streamline health workforce management), PetaLogix (embedded Linux solutions), and Leximancer (data mining to make sense of unstructured text).

For more information contact Cathy Stacey: Phone (07) 3365 6179, Mobile 0434 074 372.