Advanced Nuclear Medicine Ingredients, a wholly-owned European subsidiary of Telix (ASX:TLX), and Alpha Therapy Solutions have been jointly awarded a €990,000 ($1.56 million) ‘Eurostars-2’ research grant from the EUREKA Association.
The Eurostars program supports international projects involving at least two different participants from different Eurostars countries and led by R&D-performing small and medium-sized enterprises.
Eurostars projects are awarded access to public funding that originates from the budgets of participating countries and the European Union Horizon 2020 framework.
Funding has been awarded to Telix and ATS to develop a novel anti-cancer Targeted Alpha Therapy (TAT) using the alpha-particle emitting radioisotope - astatine-211.
The scope of the project, with a budget of €990,000 over three years, comprises scale-up radiochemistry, preclinical studies and support for a clinical proof-of-concept study.
ATS co-founder and CEO Milton Lönnroth said, “We are honoured and excited to enter this collaboration with Telix Pharmaceuticals. We look forward to helping to bring this project into clinical development and to validating our platform for the clinical production of astatinated radiopharmaceuticals. Astatine-211 presents some highly favourable characteristics for use in Targeted Alpha Therapy.
"However, the challenges of producing clinical-scale quantities of this short-lived radioisotope, combined with the lack of commercially available equipment for automated production have so far limited more widespread development. Our platform aims to mitigate these perceived challenges by making the isotope purification and radiopharmaceutical production steps, safer, more reliable and more efficient.”
Telix chief scientist Dr Michael Wheatcroft added, “Coupling the tumour-targeting specificity of peptides and antibodies with the cell-killing power of alpha-emitting radioisotopes offers potential in creating more effective therapeutics in certain cancers. The combination of Telix’s targeting agents and ATS’ automated production platform forms a potent fusion of capability to demonstrate the potential utility of Astatine-based Targeted Alpha Therapies. We are grateful to the Eurostars program in helping our two companies explore the synergies of our combined technologies, expertise and resources to enable the development of this promising area of oncology research.”