PhotoBiotics: Imperial spin-out looks for partners

Partnering opportunity

PhotoBiotics, a private biotech company spun out of Imperial College London, is looking for partners to help it develop its photodynamic therapy (PDT), in which diseased tissues containing light-activated drugs are illuminated with cold laser light. The resulting chain reaction converts oxygen into a highly toxic form that destroys any cells in close proximity. The company recently completed a successful funding round.

PhotoBiotics’ latest research results, which the company says show that special tumour-seeking proteins (antibody fragments) deliver light-activated drugs specifically to cancer targets. When illuminated, they cause complete and selective tumour regression in an animal model. The results have been published on-line in the International Journal of Cancer.

PDT has successfully treated head and neck, prostate and skin cancers. Compared with other cancer treatments, PDT leaves patients with little cosmetic scarring and there is no possibility of drug resistance developing. But being non-targeted, PDT cannot deliver light-activated drugs specifically to tumours: they can circulate in the body long after treatment, leaving patients prone to acute light-sensitised skin damage.

PhotoBiotics says its latest proprietary research solves this problem. Called targeted PDT (t-PDT), drugs go specifically to cancerous cells, rapidly leaving the body before they can cause skin damage. Based on its initial highly promising results in animals, PhotoBiotics is completing further pre-clinical studies, and expects to take its technology into clinical trials within the next three years, expanding the applications of t-PDT for many more cancers.