Gavin Painter

Gavin Painter

A project developing new adjuvants to make vaccines more effective led to Dr Gavin Painter spending six months working with immunologists at the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research (Malaghan) in Wellington.

“Traditionally vaccines have been used to fight disease, but their application to cancer treatment is relatively recent," Gavin says. "What we are working on is cellular immunotherapy, where a personalised vaccine is made up for each patient. It has three parts—dendritic cells derived from a patient’s own blood, the adjuvant and the tumour antigen.

“These vaccines are very safe and are tolerated in the body much better than a chemotherapeutic agent, but in some cases they lack efficacy. They are also expensive and time-consuming to make and hard to patent, as they are really a process and not a drug. We are developing more specific and more potent adjuvants, and are also making the antigen synthetically, to fight cancer more effectively and to have something we can patent and commercialise.

“I love chemistry, but at the end of the day it has to be led by biology, which in this work is immunology. In other projects the Carbohydrate Chemistry team has partnered with international experts, but in this work it’s exciting to be able to partner with world leaders who are based at the Malaghan, in the same city as us.

“I look forward to seeing this area of research developing as a hub, as it’s unique in New Zealand to have chemistry working so closely with immunology. Relationships have been built up over a number of years and synthetic chemists, pharmacologists and imunologists from Otago, Victoria and Auckland Universities are already contributing to the research programmes led by IRL and Malaghan.  We are also planning a human clinical trial and the cGMP manufacture of vaccine components at GlycoSyn.

“The Carbohydrate Chemistry group at IRL has some real international clout these days and it’s good to be able to use that in a local setting and build value for New Zealand. We have a unique position in the group, as we are encouraged to collaborate with industry, universities and other research organisations.

“I also think the mix of contract synthesis, research and commercialisation here is really good. Each aspect is important in the mix, and without one of the elements it would be easy to lose perspective on what our work is all about.

“IRL have been really supportive of our work in this area. Our team is quite incredible, and I have come up against very few barriers to doing the science that I believe is essential to make progress. Richard Furneaux has given me and my colleagues every opportunity to either develop their bench chemistry or branch out into more commercially-focussed projects.

Gavin received his PhD from the University of Otago and returned to IRL from Cambridge, UK in 1999 via a government sponsored post-doc.

“Although I never thought I would end up living in Wellington, I really love it here. I’ve travelled a lot to meet our international clients and to attend conferences, and been to some amazing places I would never have gone to otherwise. I’m looking forward to taking my family back to them one day.”