Alpha Tau Medical
Alpha Tau Medical Ltd is an Israeli medical device startup company founded in 2016 by CEO Uzi Sofer and several partners. The company focuses on the research, development, and commercialization of the Alpha DaRT device for treatment of solid tumors. Alpha Tau has its headquarters in the Har Hotzvim industrial park in Jerusalem, Israel, and daughter companies in the USA, Canada, and Japan. Alpha DaRT utilizes alpha radiation for internally sourced treatment of solid tumors. Conventional radiation therapy has been used to eradicate cancerous tumors since the beginning of the 20th century,[1] and is mostly delivered nowadays as external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), which utilizes either gamma wave or beta particle radiation.
DaRT technology
In 2003, Professor Itzhak Kelson of the physics department and Professor Yona Keisari of the microbiology department at Tel Aviv University, together with their PhD students Lior Arazi, Tomer Cooks and Michael Schmidt, began developing an anti-tumor technology called "Diffusing alpha emitters radiation therapy" (or DaRT). Professor Kelson had been engaged in research on technological applications of alpha particles. It became clear that the particular qualities of the alpha decay chain he was studying made it potentially suitable for use as an anti-cancer treatment.
Alpha radiation has highly potent cytotoxic capabilities against cancer cells. It causes double-stranded breaks in the tumor cell’s DNA, which are generally irreparable, making alpha radiation effective against cells which are resistant to conventional radiotherapy.[2] In addition, its short range in tissue (<0.1 mm) can guarantee an extremely high conformity to the target region, with negligible damage to surrounding healthy tissue.[3] However, the short range of alpha particles had previously limited their use to the treatment of single cancer cells or small cell clusters, as there was no practical way to use them against entire tumors. The invention of DaRT provided a way around this obstacle.
DaRT is delivered by the intratumoral insertion of small metal cylinders called "DaRT seeds" with radium-224 atoms fixed to their surface. When the radium decays, its short-lived daughter radon-220 is released from the seed through recoil kinetic energy.[3] Radon-220 and its own daughter atoms (polonium-216, lead-212, bismuth-212, polonium-212 and thalium-208) disperse in the tumor, and emit energetic alpha particles, which destroy the tumor cells. Because the alpha-emitting atoms diffuse only a few millimeters in tissue, the DaRT treatment eradicates the tumor cells while sparing the surrounding healthy tissue.[3] As many seeds can be inserted into the tumor as is required to cover the entire volume of the tumor with alpha radiation.
History of company
In 2005, Professors Kelson and Keisari and Dr. Gideon Shichman (CEO) established a startup company called Althera Medical, for the purpose of promoting the research on DaRT towards clinical use.[4] DaRT was originally patented by Ramot, the Business Engagement Center of Tel Aviv University, which later became a shareholder of Alpha Tau.[5] In 2016, Uzi Sofer, the former founder and CEO of Israeli publicly-traded medical device company Brainsway, established Alpha Tau, in order to launch clinical trials with human patients and to accelerate the commercialization of DaRT.[6]
During the period 2007-2020, 12 scientific papers describing preclinical studies and 2 papers with results from a clinical study with DaRT were published in peer-reviewed journals. These research studies helped elucidate the basic efficacy, safety, and tolerability parameters of DaRT, and the dosing requirements for effective destruction of tumors. Significant tumor reduction outcomes were achieved in studies of 10 different tumor types.
Clinical collaborations with global cancer research centers
In 2017, the first in-human clinical study was launched with DaRT (now branded as Alpha DaRT) at the Rabin Medical Center in Israel, and the IRST in Italy, under Principal Investigators Prof. Aron Popovtzer and Dr. Salvatore Bellia. The trial focused on a challenging patient population with recurrent and non-resectable tumors of the skin, and head and neck. The study showed favorable results in terms of both efficacy and safety. All treated tumors responded to the treatment (30-100% shrinkage) starting within days after its initiation. More than 75% of the tumors showed complete remission, with no relapse in the vast majority of cases, during the follow-up period. Side effects in all cases were mild to moderate, with no sign of radiation-induced damage to adjacent tissue or distant organs. The outcomes from this study were published in November 2019 in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, and Physics (see footnote 19), the official journal of the American Society for Radiation Oncology. The study was later praised in an editorial by George Q. Yang, MD and Louis B. Harrison, in the same journal.[7]
As of November 2020, clinical trials investigating Alpha DaRT as monotherapy for treatment of skin, oral cavity, breast, and pancreatic cancer, are underway in 5 countries (Israel, Japan, Russia, USA, and Canada). These trials involve clinical collaborations with prominent global cancer research and treatment centers such as: Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the University of Montreal Health Centre, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, National Cancer Center of Tokyo, and the A. Tsyb Medical Radiological Research Center in Obninsk, Russia. Recent preclinical studies have demonstrated that Alpha DaRT may help to create an in-situ tumor vaccination by inducing a long-term immune response against tumor antigens. This immune response can be effectively augmented by addition of immune-modulating drugs, leading to enhanced destruction of the primary tumor and of distant metastases. Alpha Tau intends to pursue this research in human patients.
References
- ↑ [http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-basics/history-of-cancer/cancer-treatment-radiation.html Accessed December 20, 2020.
- ↑ Seidl, C (2014). "Radioimmunotherapy with α-particle-emitting radionuclides". Immunotherapy. 6 (4): 431–58. doi:10.2217/imt.14.16. PMID 24815783. Retrieved December 20, 2020.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Arazi, L; Cooks, T; Schmidt, M; Keisari, Y; Kelson, I (2007). "Treatment of solid tumors by interstitial release of recoiling short-lived alpha emitters". Phys Med Biol. 52 (6): 5025–42. Bibcode:2007PMB....52.5025A. doi:10.1088/0031-9155/52/16/021. PMID 17671351. Retrieved December 20, 2020.
- ↑ Feldman, Batya (October 10, 2006). "Cancer treatment co Althera Medical raises $1.5 million". Globes Online. Retrieved April 5, 2020.
- ↑ "Alpha DaRT enables the first alpha-radiation-based cancer treatment for various types of solid tumors". September 15, 2018. Retrieved May 4, 2020.
- ↑ Weinreb, Gali (December 20, 2016). "Alpha Tau Medical, an Israeli company, found a way for the first time to destroy all human tumors, using alpha particles, without any side effects". Globes Newspaper. Retrieved April 5, 2020.
- ↑ Yang, G; Harrison, L (2020). "A Hard Target Needs a Sharper DaRT". Int J Radiat Biol. 107 (1): 152–53. doi:10.1016/j.ijrobp.2020.01.019. PMID 32277913 Check
|pmid=value (help). Retrieved December 21, 2020.
External links
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