UniQuest Pty Limited is widely recognized as one of Australia’s largest and most successful university commercialization groups, benchmarking in the top tier of technology transfer worldwide. UniQuest operates in the same manner as a US university research foundation, and commercializes innovations from leading Australian research institutions, including The University of Queensland, University of Wollongong, James Cook University and the Mater Medical Research Institute.

UniQuest was established in 1984 by The University of Queensland (UQ). Innovative and responsive management, coupled with significant investment from UQ has enabled UniQuest to build a highly respected and successful commercial enterprise. In the past decade, UniQuest has become self-funded and increased its commercialization capacity and revenues by four-fold.

UniQuest’s charter is to identify, package and commercialize university technologies, expertise and facilities to the community, industry, business and government. Since 2000, UniQuest and its start-ups have raised a quarter of a billion dollars to take UQ technologies to market, and sales of products and services with UQ technology are now running at $3.4 billion per year.

To industry, business and government UniQuest provides:

• Investment opportunities in early-stage technologies and innovations;
• Access to world-class intellectual property, research expertise and facilities;
• Developing and evaluating projects as well as packaging and management of multi-disciplinary teams for local and international development projects; and
• Specialized consulting and research contracts across a breadth of disciplines.

Our portfolio includes industrial biotech, cleantech, pain management and medical devices, for example:

Pepfactants Pty Ltd
Pepfactants Pty Ltd is developing “smart”, practical and effective methods for products and processes in the chemical, pharmaceutical, and industrial markets.

The primary technology is believed to be the first surfactant that can truly reversibly control the formation, stabilization and destabilization of emulsions and foams. The stability of an emulsion or foam is dependant on the stability of the surfactant at the fluid-fluid interface, which - with the use of Pepfactants’ new technology - can be hours, months, or years.

Advantages

• Tailored interfacial stability
• unprecedented control over the behavior of the interfacial layer in emulsion and foam systems;
• Applicable to both emulsion and foam systems
• greater versatility;
• Can be custom-designed to respond to various external stimuli
• enabling the use of stimuli appropriate to the context of the application;
• Simple, reversible, highly cost-effective compared to de-emulsifiers and defoamers
• improved profit potential
• Applicable to biocatalysis
• improved efficiency for industrial reactions.

Opportunity

We are actively seeking industrial partners to collaborate with us to co-develop the technology to meet their specific needs.

MorphPlus
MorphPlus technology could reduce the dose of opioid required to produce analgesia. It offers several potential treatments for nociceptive and neuropathic pain by combining opioid drugs (eg. morphine) with nitric oxide (NO) donors in various novel ways. These NO-Opioid drugs have proven to increase the potency of opioids for the treatment of nociceptive pain and to render opioids effective in the treatment of neuropathic pain in animal model studies.

Advantages

MorphPlus is being developed as an alternative to current opioid analgesics for neuropathic pain caused by nerve injury, infection or diabetes. Current medications for painful Diabetic Neuropathy, for example, are effective in less than 50% of patients and many patients experience dose-limiting side-effects. Current opioids for strong nociceptive pain (cancer, postoperative, etc) given in the usual analgesic doses can also produce unwanted side effects  such as respiratory depression, nausea, vomiting, sedation and constipation.

By increasing the analgesic potency of the opioid, but not that of the side-effects, these problems would be minimized.

Opportunity

There is a substantial unmet medical need for new drugs to treat both kinds of pain. We are seeking research partners and/or investors to fund the pre-clinical/early clinical development of several novel proprietary products from the MorphPlus technology.

Improved Urinary Catheters

Urinary catheterization is required for bladder examinations, urine collection, application of local treatments to the bladder and for those patients who suffer urinary incontinence. However, increased rates of infection and trauma to the urethra, particularly in men, from incorrect insertion of catheters are becoming more common due to stricture along the length of the urethra in hospitalized patients and under-trained clinical staff.

Advantages

Designed by a medical doctor and urological specialist this improved catheter can be inserted with significantly less risk of trauma, scarring and infection to the urethra.

The invention is applicable to both Foley and intermittent catheters, which capture 95% of the market. It has application for catheterization of male patients and those patients (including females) where catheterization is difficult to perform.

Opportunity

In 2007, the revenue for the US urinary catheter market was $310 million, with a compound annual growth rate of 6.7%. Moreover, the European market for urinary catheters is around double that of the US counterpart.

The single largest driver of market demand for urinary catheters is the ever-increasing aging population who require catheterization during their hospitalization. It is anticipated that catheters which are easier to insert and which reduce infection rates would increase market demand and share.

We are currently seeking commercial partners or licensees for future development of this technology.