'Stealth smart bomb' to aid cancer therapy
Thursday November 05 2009
A NANOTECHNOLOGY therapy that attacks cancer with a "stealth smart bomb" is to begin patient trials next year in the first clinical test of a pioneering approach to medicine .
The nanoparticle, which targets tumour cells while evading the body's immune system, promises to deliver larger and more effective doses of drugs to cancers while sparing patients many of the distressing side-effects of chemotherapy.
Animal studies have indicated the treatment can shrink tumours "essentially to zero", while being better tolerated than conventional cancer treatments.
A trial involving about 25 cancer patients is due to start within a year. If successful, it could lead to a licensed drug within five years.
Although the therapy was designed originally for prostate cancer, it is expected to be effective against other solid tumours, including forms of breast, lung and brain cancer. Patients with some of these cancers, as well as prostate cancer, may be included in the first trial.
Developed by US company, BIND Biosciences, the technology should also be suitable for delivering drugs used to treat other conditions, as well as for the chemotherapy agents it has been set up to carry.
"This should be the first targeted nanoparticle delivering a chemotherapeutic to enter clinical trials," Jeff Hrkach, company vice president of pharmaceutical sciences, said.
"We are then looking to develop this as a broad platform that could also be used to treat cardiovascular disease, inflammation, even infectious disease."
The nanoparticle, BIND 014, is designed to ensure therapeutic molecules get to the right place in the body, are released slowly and keep the body's immune system from recognising them as foreign and destroying them.(© The Times, London)
- Mark Henderson
Irish Independent
