Start-up company Nanovi has just had a biodegradable tumour marker approved, which can provide a more precise radiation therapy for patients with lung and oesophageal tumours.
This week, the Danish medical company Nanovi—a spin-out from DTU—is launching its first new technology for improving radiation therapy for cancer patients. It will happen at the European radiotherapy convention European Society for Radiotherapy & Oncology (ESTRO) in Italy with the participation of doctors, hospital physicists, engineers, and researchers from all over the world.
The new product, BioXmark, has just been approved, and can now be marketed in the EU. This will benefit thousands of cancer patients with lung and oesophageal tumours.
BioXmark is a biodegradable tumour marker which can be injected into cancerous growths in patients, thereby making the tumour visible to the doctors at the time of treatment. The marker can be used to increase radiation therapy precision, thus improving the cancer treatment and reducing side-effects. Behind the research is Professor Thomas Lars Andresen and his team from DTU Nanotech:
“We have created a technology that has gone in a straight line from DTU’s laboratories to applicable health technology at the hospitals. And that is something quite unique. For Nanovi, the breakthrough means that we can create more jobs in Denmark, but I also believe that it will attract new technologies, investors, and international researchers to all of DTU.”
Already in spring 2014, Nanovi was selected and presented as one of the most promising start-up enterprises focusing on radiation therapy for cancer. The profile was published in the American journal Start-up, which specializes in in-depth analyses and reviews of new enterprises for the benefit of investors, business developers, and others.
Clinically tested at Rigshospitalet
For the past couple of years, BioXmark has been clinically tested on lung cancer patients and patients with oesophageal cancer at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen. Here the results have shown that the product is stable, well-tolerated, and easy to use.
The new marker is in fluid form during the injection, and can therefore be inserted into the patient using an extremely thin needle. This makes it possible to work with the same equipment that is currently used to take tissue biopsies when doctors are diagnosing lung cancer. In this way, you can place the marker in many types of tumours, including particularly fragile tissue such as lung tissue.
Once the fluid marker has been injected, it turns into a gel that the body itself breaks down into harmless sugars over the course of a couple of years.
The marker is approved for the thorax region, i.e. lung tumours and oesophageal cancer.
Read more at Nanovi’s website.