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.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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