Radiotherapy is a standard therapy for many cancer patients but suffers from side effects to healthy tisues. There is an increasing interest in radiosensitizers to improve the outcome of radiotherapy, and lower toxicity. Therefore, the market for radiosensitizers is accelerating. There is a major opportunity for means to improve their pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties. The local delivery within the tumor environment, and not elsewhere in the body, provide these improvements. This is the main commercialisation strategy developed in the iGOLDD ERC PoC and is based on a combination of local hyperthermia and temperature-sensitive drug carriers (liposomes), a platform technology developed in the original Sound-Pharma ERC grant, and further optimized in the iGOLDD PoC project. Targeting the radiosensitizer delivery has been identified in the iGOLDD project as the subfield with the highest commercialization potential, and has thus been further elaborated.
Temperature sensitive liposome-encapsulated radiosensitizers in combination with local hyperthermia are expected to overcome the limitations on optimal – clinically relevant – use of local delivery of radiosensitizer agents, because of the intravascular “burst” release upon hyperthermia. Our translational research team has come together around the notion that the image-guided drug delivery platform can be commercially developed for cancer patients to benefit from improved pharmacodynamic and pharmacokinetic properties of radiosensitizer delivery. A co-dvelopment proposition strategy was prepared to provide a route-to-market of the developed local drug delivery platform. Based on this strategy, preliminary agreement has been reached with key European commercial partners to co-develop the technology into a commercial application.
