The National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) yesterday said that a new cancer drug delivery system — DBPR115 — developed by an affiliated institute has obtained approval from the US Food and Drug Administration as an investigational new drug that can enter phase 1 clinical trials.
The NHRI said that the delivery system was developed by researchers at its Institute of Biotechnology and Pharmaceutical Research (IBPR), supported by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Department of Industrial Technology, under the government’s technology development program.
IBPR Director Chang Jang-yang (張俊彥) said that drugs can be used to treat cancer cells, but high doses often cause severe side effects, as they can also damage normal cells.
Photo: Wu Liang-yi, Taipei Times
The new system more effectively delivers drugs to targeted cancer cells, reducing the side effects, Chang said.
Using as an example irinotecan — a drug used to treat colon, rectal or pancreatic cancer — the new system can deliver 20 percent of the original dosage of the drug to achieve the same therapeutic effect, he said.
Many existing targeted drug therapies use drugs combined with monoclonal antibodies, which can identify and attack cells that have particular types of antigen, but sometimes antigen shedding by the cancer cells can reduce the delivery efficiency of the antibody-based drugs, IBPR associate investigator Tsou Lun (鄒倫) said.
The new delivery system uses a small molecule to replace the antibody and bind it to the drug, delivering it to targeted cancer sites more efficiently, increasing drug concentration at targeted tumor sites for a better therapeutic effect with reduced side effects, Tsou said.
The small molecule drug delivery system can also enhance the drug’s ability to recognize signals from cancer cells more effectively, he said.
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