Relevant's Approach to Radiotheranostics
The Challenge of Cancer: A Global Fight
Understanding the Scope:
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Incidence: Every year, an estimated 6-7 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed globally. This number is expected to rise in the coming years due to population growth and aging.
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Impact: Cancer not only affects individuals but also has a significant economic and social burden on families, communities, and healthcare systems. The cost of cancer care is substantial, placing a strain on healthcare resources.
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Large Unmet Need Still Exist
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Estimated ~ ½ of patients with cancer in US can be helped with existing therapies & remaining ½ expected to progress quickly.
Limitations of Traditional Treatments:
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Surgery: Can be invasive and may not be suitable for all types or stages of cancer.
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Chemotherapy: Can have harsh side effects that impact patients' quality of life.
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Radiation Therapy: Can damage healthy tissues surrounding the tumor.
The Need for Advancements:
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The limitations of traditional treatments necessitate the development of more effective, targeted, and safer therapies to improve patient outcomes and quality of life.
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This is where next-generation radiotheranostics step in, offering a promising approach to tackling the global challenge of cancer.
Introducing Radiotheranostics: A Dual-Action Weapon Against Cancer
Radiotheranostics combine the power of diagnostics and therapeutics into a single, targeted strategy. It utilizes radioactive molecules that serve two crucial functions:
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Imaging: These molecules act as imaging agents, allowing doctors to visualize and accurately pinpoint the location and extent of cancer cells through techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) scans.
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Therapy: Once precisely located, the same molecules deliver a potent dose of targeted radiation therapy directly to the cancer cells, inducing cell death and shrinking tumors.
This dual-action approach offers several advantages over traditional cancer treatments:
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Enhanced targeting: Radiotheranostics deliver radiation precisely to cancer cells, minimizing damage to healthy tissues and reducing side effects.
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Improved efficacy: The targeted nature of radiotheranostics can potentially improve treatment effectiveness compared to broader-acting therapies.
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Personalized treatment: Radiotheranostics can be tailored to the specific type and characteristics of a patient's cancer, offering a more personalized approach to treatment.
The Relevant Radiotheranostic Technology
The Relevant TAA antibodies are highly unique in that they are isolated from healthy volunteers which have evolved to create a memory for this antibody should you develop cancer. They are nature’s therapeutic drugs which are embedded in the memory of our immune system. Having this memory for the antibody indicates our immune system has conserved this molecule because it is important to our survival and is a natural tool for fighting cancer. A unique feature of this specific antibody is its ability to internalize or go from outside the cell to inside the cell after binding.
This makes the Relevant antibody fragment the perfect radiopharmaceutical carrier as the radioactivity will move inside the cell while attached to the antibody and a radiate in a circle around each molecule some 200-300 cells away or about a 1/2 of a millimeter in the case of beta emitters. This radiation kills the nearby cancer cells in a precision medicine fashion. Relevant believes this is superior to antibody drug conjugate therapy in that not every cell has to be that bonded to produce a therapeutic effect which is required for antibody drug conjugates.
Unique Antibody Platform
The unique nature of the Relevant technology is the identification of our portfolio of antibodies which were isolated directly from humans rather than created in mice. Relevant screened a total of 16 million memory B-cells to identify and clone these 5 high-affinity, well-established antibodies known to be expressed on tumors. These naturally derived antibodies reduce the risk of unanticipated safety issues and poor activity as they are optimized in people not in a test-tube. Since our antibodies are fully human, our preclinical timelines are shortened and safety, affinity, and homology profiles are optimized and as such have demonstrated utility in humans.
The advantages of the natural isolation of human antibodies when compared to antibodies derived from mice, phage display, and transgenic mice are shown in the table. The Relevant natural human antibodies are optimized in the human body whereas antibodies created from the other methods must be artificially optimized using genetic sequence manipulation to improve binding affinity to the target. Relevant’s Natural Human Antibodies exhibit the naturally selected variable heavy and light chain pairing, whereas the other methods do not. This natural pairing improves the binding affinity to the cancer target. The humanization of antibodies generated using a mouse incorporate foreign proteins into the antibody which can be immunogenic and lead to allergic reactions and anti-idiotypic antibody production which prevents the neutralizing antibody from binding to the cellular target and is therefore inactive.
CORDIA PLATFORM (Carrier Optimized Radiation Dosimetry-Informed Antibodies)
The CORDIA platform allows for the creation of highly efficient antibody fragments to optimize the dosimetry and therapeutic index of our radiotheranostic compounds. These fragments range in size from 50 kDa to 125 kDa with multiple valences from monovalent to tetravalent. These smaller antibody fragments have a short half life which allows for optimal tumor doses of radiation while minimizing off target tissue damage. The radioisotopes used are both alpha and beta emitters and are selected based on the presentation of the cancer being treated. For bulky disease, beta emitters provide a longer kill path which is important for debulking large metastatic tumors. Alpha agents are selected when the disease presents with micro metastasis and have been debulked in an adjuvant setting.
