How WEHI Turns Lab Discoveries Into Biotech Companies

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From Lab Bench to Boardroom: Inside WEHI's Startup Ecosystem

A groundbreaking discovery published in Science, Nature, or Cell can mark the first hope for patients with no available treatment. But a paper, on its own, heals no one. The distance between a striking result in the lab and a drug prescribed at the bedside is the work of countless people. Somewhere in that space, someone must raise the capital, build the company, and persuade investors, again and again,  that an idea born of pure scientific curiosity — one for which no market yet exists — is worth the wager.

At WEHI, that "somewhere" now has a name, a fund, and a growing list of companies.

The Missing Step Between Discovery and Treatment

Venetoclax is proof of what's possible: a 1988 lab observation about a protein called BCL-2 eventually became a cancer drug used by tens of thousands of patients worldwide, and returned hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties back to WEHI. But that outcome took nearly three decades, and depended on multinational pharmaceutical companies — Genentech, AbbVie — picking up WEHI's early research and carrying it the rest of the way.

Not every discovery gets that kind of partner. A growing number of WEHI's breakthroughs are now taking a different route: instead of licensing the idea to an existing pharmaceutical giant, WEHI is helping researchers spin the discovery out into its own company, built from the ground up around a single scientific insight.

66ten — WEHI's Own Venture Fund

That shift has a name: 66ten, WEHI's first strategic investment fund and one of the largest of its kind based inside an Australian medical research institute. Backed by $66 million, with a goal to have the entire fund deployed by 2033, 66ten exists to do something research institutes have traditionally left to outside investors — provide seed funding to turn a lab discovery into a company, before it's mature enough to attract conventional venture capital.

The fund currently backs four companies at seed and Series A stage, plus a growing pipeline of pre-seed projects still maturing from proof-of-concept toward a formal spin-out. One of its portfolio companies, Proxima Bio, is led by CEO Dr Jonathan Bernardini and develops cell surface degraders — a new approach targeting previously undruggable, disease-causing proteins, with potential applications in autoimmune conditions and cancer. Other projects, like an early-stage iron-deficiency diagnostic test called TrueIron, are still small teams validating a concept, well before they reach that stage.

Ternarx and the Hunt for "Undruggable" Cancers

Ternarx is the clearest example of a discovery that's already grown into a fully independent company. Led by CEO Dr Joanne Boag, the company was launched with $15 million in Australian government funding and spun out of WEHI to commercialise a technology platform for targeted protein degraders — a newer class of drugs designed to destroy disease-causing proteins that conventional drugs simply can't reach. Ternarx's first targets are neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer, and certain forms of prostate cancer, the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Australian men.

What makes Ternarx notable isn't just the science — it's the structure. Rather than researchers publishing a result and waiting for a pharmaceutical company to notice, WEHI built the company around the discovery itself, complete with its own dedicated facility inside the WEHI Biotechnology Centre.

From Necroptosis to Anaxis Pharma

A decade earlier, a similar pattern played out with a very different kind of biology. WEHI researchers had spent years characterising necroptosis — a form of programmed cell death distinct from the apoptosis pathway behind venetoclax — and identifying its role in driving inflammation. That basic research became the foundation for a joint venture called Catalyst Therapeutics, formed between WEHI and drug discovery partner SYNthesis Research.

In 2017, Catalyst Therapeutics spun out Anaxis Pharma — led by CEO Dr Andrew Wilks — to carry the necroptosis-targeting compounds through drug development. The company went on to partner with Servier, a global pharmaceutical group, progressing these compounds through the drug development process to the point where they are now close to the selection of a preclinical candidate.

What This Means for the Next Discovery

None of this replaces the traditional route of licensing a discovery to an established pharmaceutical company — venetoclax remains WEHI's biggest success story, and that model isn't going away. But 66ten, Ternarx, Proxima Bio, and Anaxis Pharma represent something WEHI didn't have a decade ago: the infrastructure to keep a discovery in-house long enough to become a company in its own right, rather than handing it off the moment the science looks promising.

The bet is the same one that's run through every story in this series — that a well-run research institute doesn't just make discoveries, it builds the systems that carry those discoveries all the way to a patient. 66ten is simply WEHI's newest attempt to close that gap a little faster, and keep a little more of the outcome — scientific and financial — within the institute that made the discovery possible in the first place.