Vision: To improve treatment for cancer patients by delivering the drug straight to the tumor, and achieve a more efficient treatment without side effects.
Name: CapsuTech Ltd
CEO: Dr. Eyal Neria
Sector: Pharmaceuticals
Suc-Sector: Natural Materials
Medical Field: Cancer
Est.: 2006
Stage: Pre-Clinical
Vision: To improve treatment for cancer patients by delivering the drug straight to the tumor, and achieve a more efficient treatment without side effects.
Targeted drug delivery is one of the main challenges for pharmaceutical companies. After all, even if you have the best cure for cancer, it won’t do the patient any good if the drug molecules become diluted too much in the blood, or are digested by enzymes on the way to the tumor. Several companies in the biomedical market are trying to find ways around this problem, using various elements to ensure that the drug gets mainly to the infected tissue, and as little as possible to all the rest. CapsuTech is one of those companies in Israel.
CapsuTech Ltd, a company founded in 2006 and based in Nazareth, has a highly focused view on where it’s heading, as may be understood from their unofficial motto: “Our way to deliver your drug”. Their drug delivery technology is based around amino acid polymers modified with cyclodextrins that create molecular pockets. The drug is encapsulated within the molecular pockets and surrounded by the polymer, and in that protective shell is supposed to be protected from damaging factors such as enzymatic degradation, PH changes and oxidation.
One of the proposed uses for CapsuTech’s drug delivery technology is for targeted delivery of chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells. Since collagenases are secreted mainly from cancer cells, the polymer drug-carrier can be designed to include collagen sequences, to be cleaved only in the vicinity of cancer cells. The end result: higher efficacy of the drug in the body, and less side effects. Then again, that’s what everybody in cancer treatment is working on at the moment. So what’s CapsuTech’s status?
At least at the moment, the company is still in the research stage on cellular and animal systems, and hasn’t gone on to clinical trials yet. It has only five workers, and operates as part of the NGT Incubator in Nazareth with secured research grant from the Office of the Chief Scientist of Israel and the European Seventh Framework Programme. It should be quite interesting to keep track of the company as it develops its product, especially if it manages to reach the clinical trials stage in human beings.
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