Clinical NeedThere are numerous potential applications of the BioTransformations technology as through it, the power of antibodies may be directed anywhere in the body accessible to illumination.
Thus the skin, eye, gastrointestinal tract, genital-urinary tracts, lungs, and with keyhole approaches, regions such as the peritoneum are all potential applications for BioTransformations' technology.
Added to these are the many opportunities presented by surgery. For example, after a surgeon has excised or debulked a tumour in any part of the body, that area is exposed and can be readily illuminated.
There are many highly attractive reasons for employing light-based therapies – especially when the results can have a dramatic effect on a disease process. Light is safe, cheap, reproducible, easy to handle and provides the key to unlocking the dramatic effects required.
Other techniques in this area include:
- Intense green pigments have been coupled to antibodies such that when illuminated with red light they heat surrounding tissue;
- Photodynamic moieties have been conjugated to antibodies such that when illuminated they provide toxic triplet oxygen to kill surrounding cells; and
- Cytotoxic drugs have been conjugated to antibodies by photolytic linkers providing the liberation of free drug at an illuminated site.
However none of these techniques enables the control of the actual binding of the antibody in its target region. This is what BioTransformations technology brings. Such control provides access to a wealth of opportunities, such as the major application BioTransformations has focused on, to allow a patient’s immune system to be directed around the body by light.
The potential of regional therapy has been recognized and explored by others using techniques such as limb-ligation in which a toxic drug is infused into a limb to treat a region within it but restricted from immediately entering the rest of the body by limb-ligation. The attractiveness of BioTransformations’ light approach over such physical methods comes from lack of invasiveness and other harmful side effects.
The aim of BioTransformations is to develop its technology to provide minimally invasive, efficacious and targeted treatments for a range of conditions, starting with cancer. The fact that the illumination only activates the antibody at the tumour site should also bring benefits in terms of limited systemic side effects and adverse reactions patients experience with alternative therapies.