by
Loren Bonner, DOTmed News Online Editor | April 24, 2012
From the April 2012 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“We started the program [Nanotechnology for Cancer] seven years ago and I see more activity in the translational space now than in the beginning. There are a number of companies that have been established by these academic researchers,” says Grodzinski.
Stanford University licensed part of its magnetic bioassay chip technology to MagArray Inc., a startup company in Silicon Valley.
The founders of MagArray saw an opportunity in biomarker research, just as their colleagues did at Stanford. But they took it one step further by commercializing their product— a technology that is based on the computer disk drive industry that they have adapted for medical diagnostics.
“[The founders] took that same technology and realized that the sensor at the tip of the arm of a disk drive that goes back and forth could be embedded into chips. But instead of having a magnetic plate, you take nanoparticles and use those as a label. We can mix that with our sample and measure the presence of nanoparticles,” says MagArray CEO Luis Carbonell.
The end product is a biodetection chip that uses nanoparticles to zero in on proteins in a patient sample, and find tumor antigens—shed by cancer cells—in the blood with much greater sensitivity, adding to the growing body of nano-based diagnostic tools used to detect the presence of cancer at an early stage.
Dr. Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that nanomedicine is transforming diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities for cancer through these ultra-rapid diagnostics. As a pioneer in the field of nanomedicine, with accomplishments spanning over 20 years, Langer’s research and subsequent business ventures seek a similar goal to create ultra-rapid diagnostics, in addition to brand new targeted therapies.
The basis of Langer’s work revolves around small interfering RNAs, discovered in the late 1990s. These tiny pieces of RNA have the ability to shut off specific genes, for example, an aggressive type of cancer. Along with Dr. Omid Farokhzad at Harvard, Langer has developed RNA molecules as tools to guide nanoparticles into cancer cells and deliver drug therapies more effectively.
As their research progressed, Langer and Farokhzad founded a Cambridge, Mass.-based company called BIND Biosciences to commercialize their product. The nanoparticles they’ve engineered are able to deliver higher and more effective doses of drugs to tumors, while at the same time sparing healthy tissue—something that chemotherapy treatment is not able to do and accounts for its adverse side-effects. They pack Docetaxel, a common cancer drug, into these specially engineered nanoparticles, which allows them to bind to the cancer cells and not the healthy cells. Phase I clinical trials are currently underway to look at safety and to determine proper dose design of these highly selective targeted therapeutics.
