About Us

Focus on pain
Spinifex focuses on pain because it is an area of high unmet medical need, and therefore provides many commercial opportunities. Demand for pain drugs continues to increase, fuelling the growth of a market that is expected to be worth US$75 billion annually by 2010. With most types of pain still poorly treated, considerable investment is being made internationally in discovering novel approaches to treat pain, providing Spinifex with a wide choice of early-stage drugs from which to license products for development.

Focus on development
Spinifex's expertise lies in the development of pain drugs rather than the initial discovery. Our core strategy is to in-license promising pain drugs at an early stage of development from academic and commercial institutions, and to add value to these 'drug candidates' by designing and implementing effective development programs. Spinifex will conduct the preclinical and early-phase clinical studies before actively seeking a partnership with a major pharmaceutical company to help complete clinical development, file for regulatory approval, and carry out marketing activities. The value of this strategy will be further reinforced by forming a strategic alliance with a major pharmaceutical company. The alliance will generate revenue fuelling further development of additional drug candidates.

Spinifex believes that its core activities of preclinical and initial clinical development are the stages in the drug development process that provide the most potential return to shareholders by avoiding the high risks associated with initial drug discovery and the high costs incurred in the late-stage clinical studies and selling and marketing products. This focus will allow us to operate with a small core staff, with expertise in designing product development plans, co-ordinating the management of clinical studies and the outsourcing of various specialised tasks such as trial monitoring, formulation, stability testing, product manufacture, and packaging, in addition to preclinical safety and toxicity studies. This 'virtual' model allows Spinifex to maximise our operational flexibility while minimising overheads.