Our research and innovation (R&I) journey
2025 marks ten years since Telix’s inception and eight since it became a public company. While the Telix of today is still recognizable in our initial public offering prospectus, our growth and investment as a commercial-stage company have been transformative.
A significant part of our success is due to the work of our R&I team. In close collaboration with other technical and commercial functions of the business, they have identified new clinical applications of our technology, platforms that can expand and improve clinical workflow, and manufacturing optimizations that improve product margins. More generally, they have ’looked over the horizon’ to where the field is going in terms of using targeted radiation in oncology.
However, using the term ‘Research and Innovation’ also reflects a philosophy central to the first decade of Telix’s life, primarily about sourcing external innovation. A key driver of our rapid growth was collaborative, third-party access to technology. We generally preferred to ‘buy’ rather than ’build’ technology, and sought clinically de-risked opportunities, reflecting the low cost of entry and the fact that the field of radiopharmaceuticals was commercially undeveloped.
Fast-forward from 2015 to 2025, and the world has changed. The cost of asset acquisition has skyrocketed, evidenced by recent transactions - even for pre-clinical assets. Like many other growth areas of pharmaceuticals, platform technologies -with the potential to produce multiple innovative medicines - are particularly attractive. This is especially so in radiopharma, where the mechanism-of-action (MoA) is dependent both on the pharmacology of a targeting agent and the radiobiology of a particular isotope. Radiochemistry, therefore, naturally lends itself to platforms.
First-in-class dual-chelator theranostic on the cover of Chemical Science
Chemical Science, the flagship journal for The Royal Society of Chemistry, published the outcome of a joint research project between Telix, The University of Sydney, and The University of Queensland.
This research represents the culmination of a highly successful academic-industry collaboration and innovation, stemming from early conversations between Professor Rachel Codd and Telix Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wheatcroft, about future improvements that could complement the burgeoning field of theranostics. As a result, Prof. Codd and co-workers developed a proprietary, first-in-class, dual-chelator technology based on DFOB (Desferrioxamine B) and DOTA (1,4,7,10-tetraazacyclododecane-1,4,7,10-tetraacetic acid) that can deliver either therapeutic or diagnostic radiation to a tumor, when attached to a monoclonal antibody. By designing a single agent to bind complementary diagnostic and therapeutic radiometal pairs, this platform technology aims to streamline future development pathways and improve patient dosimetry in theranostics, an increasingly important direction of cancer care. We are excited to continue this collaboration and drive this platform technology - which has shown such promise in preclinical studies - through to clinical translation and commercialization.
You can read the full article here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2024/SC/D4SC02851A
Building a platform for success
In 2025, Telix’s R&I engine will formally become an 'R&D' engine comprising several, well-established platforms that are significant generators of internal intellectual property and domain knowledge. These include:
A novel biologics / engineered antibody development platform: able to produce new targeting agents against virtually any target of interest, engineered and optimised for use as a radiopharmaceutical.
Conjugation / linker technology: with significant expertise in macrocyclic organic chemistry (including GMP scale-up in-house).
Isotope Center of Excellence (ICE): dedicated to isotope processing and supply chain technical excellence, the ICE team includes extensive physics expertise in reactor-, generator- and cyclotron-based radionuclide production, including in-house research cyclotron resources.
In-house Phase 0/1 dosimetry and clinical translation capabilities: including access to pre-clinical and clinical PET/CT and SPECT/CT.
Artificial intelligence (AI), image processing and machine learning: a dedicated team within our MedTech group to support clinical decision support, optimize product workflows and support trial data analysis.
These platforms and capabilities are accessible to four key research themes, formally organized under Dr. Wheatcroft’s leadership:
Future radiopharmaceuticals: primarily focused on the radiobiology, development and use of alpha-emitting isotopes (including conjugation techniques) underpinning Telix’s next-generation pipeline.
Tumor micro-environment: exploring how targeted radiation can be used to interrogate/probe the tumor micro-environment (Px) and identify which combination therapies may be optimally developed with Tx radiopharmaceuticals. This group has a particular interest in key combination MoAs, such as immuno-oncology and mechanisms of DNA damage repair.
New targets: many of Telix’s Px and Tx assets can be used in multiple validated clinical applications, however there are also gaps. There may be biology of interest that requires exploration of new targets, and targets that may be synergistic with our existing pipeline.
Translational medicine and pre-clinical excellence: fast and innovative strategies to quickly attain ‘proof-of-concept' in patients for new radiopharmaceutical innovations, as well as fast-track strategies for life-cycle management of our existing Px and Tx pipeline that leverages our extensive clinical data.
