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Midatech Pharma inks new deal with leading US cancer centre

Published: 16:47 14 Apr 2015 AEST

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Midatech Pharma (LON:MTPH) said it has inked a new collaboration with the America’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to test the pre-clinical effectiveness of its nano-medicines in the brain tumour glioblastoma.

The aim of the tie-up with this world leading research group, which is a teaching affiliate of the Harvard Medical School, is to find most effective targeted treatments as quickly as possible.

There is a significant unmet medical need currently as glioblastoma is difficult to combat given the given the different cell types at play.

Chief executive, Dr Jim Philips, said: "This collaboration demonstrates the growing interest in our technology across a range of therapeutic compounds and for specifically targeting certain types of cancer cells. 

“Glioblastoma is a very common but hard to treat brain cancer condition with poor survival rates.  

“Our goal is to develop an effective treatment that transforms patient outcomes via our collaboration with Dana-Farber."

Midatech has two platforms – a carbohydrate-coated gold nanoparticle and its sustained release system. Both are about getting medicines to the right place in the right quantities at the right time.

The company’s gold nano-particles, or GNPs for short, promise a revolution in targeted therapies for cancer.

To radically simplify the process deployed these GNPs act as guided missiles.

In treating cancer with traditional chemo-therapy, for instance, they are programmed to hit ONLY a specific tumour type with their payload.

This highly targeted approach allows physicians to potentially administer lower doses and it also means there is little collateral damage.

Its Q-Sphera technology works in a different way to deliver the drug at the right time.

It is a sustained release platform and has adopted 3D and ink jet printing techniques to create particles that dissolve in a certain way over a certain time-scale.

 

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