Imperial spin-out gains investment, and investors

Funding round completed

PhotoBiotics Ltd, a spin-out from Imperial College London, has completed a further funding round to support development of its innovative technology for targeting light-activated anti-cancer drugs to tumours. Following its successful bid for €300,000 of EU funding, the spin-out company has just acquired £250,000 from a consortium which includes two unnamed new investors.

The new financing round follows 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.

In photodynamic therapy (PDT), 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.

PDT has successfully treated head and neck, prostate and skin cancers. Compared to 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.

On the latest investment, Dr Elizabeth Rollinson, PhotoBiotics’ Commercial Director, said, “This confirms that our new t-PDT approach is beginning to attract the funding it deserves to make it into a mainstream clinical reality, and we are excited that PhotoBiotics is in the vanguard of developing this innovative technology. The funding round will allow PhotoBiotics to attain value-enhancing milestones in its therapeutic and diagnostic research and development programmes.”