#C17436
Inventor(s): Stavroula Sofou (primary), Kannan Rangaramanujam, Rajiv Nair
Unmet Need
Glioblastoma accounts for 49.1 percent of all primary malignant brain tumors. Although current standard of care, which includes surgery, followed by radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, may prolong survival, the five-year survival rate for glioblastoma patients is only 6.8 percent, and the average length of survival for glioblastoma patients is estimated to be only 8 months (National Brain Tumor Society). Since the tumor is both hard to locate and treat without adverse consequences to the healthy surrounding tissues, current therapies often have poor outcomes due to the inability to uniformly kill off the cancerous cells or off target damages to healthy tissues. Therefore, there exists a strong need for a therapeutic strategy that will selectively and effectively kill glioblastoma tumor cells with minimal off target effects.
Technology Overview
Johns Hopkins researchers have developed a groundbreaking technology using radioactive alpha particles and nanoparticles to treat glioblastoma. By associating with macrophages found in the glioblastoma microenvironments, the nanoparticles can target and deliver alpha particles to uniformly kill glioblastoma cells with minimum toxicity to the surrounding tissue. Significantly, this technology captures the rarely achieved balancing point between selectively targeting tumor cells, while uniformly distributing throughout the entire tumor. As an added bonus, the alpha particles in the invention provide a form of radiotherapy which is theoretically impossible for cancer cells to develop resistance against. If clinically translated, this novel therapy has the potential to open a new chapter in drug delivery for pediatric brain tumors, perhaps even becoming a new standard of care for glioblastoma.
Stage of Development
Inventors have compared their novel therapeutic against current standards of care in vivo, verified tumor associated macrophage selectivity and cancer cell killing in vitro, and verified selective uptake of the therapeutic in tumor associated macrophages. In vivo mouse models show that the therapeutic is safe and has increases survival time beyond the current standards of care (chemotherapeutic Temozolomide). Inventors are currently optimizing the dosing scheduling on mouse models and possibly demonstrating efficacy in other animal models.
Publication
N/A
