The Roche Research Institute of Marine Pharmacology, 1974–1981: Searching for Drug Leads from Australian Marine Organisms

Abstract

In the late 1960s the Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche was attracted to the pharmacological potential of extractives from Australian marine organisms. At first the company supported the work of University of Queensland zoologist Robert Endean and work at the Great Barrier Reef Research Station on Heron Island. Within a few years, however, they severed their connection with Endean and established the Roche Research Institute of Marine Pharmacology (RRIMP) at Dee Why, New South Wales. Opened in April 1974, the Institute was led by Dr J. T. Baker, an Australian organic chemist who had researched marine natural products. State-of-the-art pharmacology was introduced with guidance from Professor Michael Rand of the University of Melbourne. The staff that Baker recruited included chemists, pharmacologists, microbiologists and marine biologists. Despite the conjecture, raised in some quarters, that RRIMP was established to mute the Australian Government's criticism of the pricing of Roche's most famous product, Valium, it is argued that the research venture was a genuine attempt to find lead compounds in organisms from Australian waters with a view to the development of new drugs. Before any such success could be achieved by RRIMP scientists, however, sweeping changes in the parent company resulted in the closure of RRIMP in mid-1981 and dispersal of its expert staff, mostly to other Australian laboratories.