Telix Pharmaceuticals (ASX:TLX) says it has entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with US-based RefleXion Medical.
RefleXion is a therapeutic oncology company pioneering biology-guided radiotherapy (BgRT) as a new modality for treating all stages of cancer.
The new collaboration will investigate the clinical utility of combining the companies’ technologies to improve treatment for high-risk or recurrent prostate and aggressive kidney cancers.
Under the agreement, the parties will evaluate several new positron emission tomography (PET) tracers, including 68Ga-PSMA-11 for prostate cancer and 89Zr-Girentuximab for kidney cancer, to evaluate their potential in guiding BgRT to treat disease.
“The Telix tracers show considerable potential for detecting metastatic disease,” said Phuoc Tran, professor of radiation oncology and molecular radiation sciences, oncology and urology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.
“Combining them with RefleXion’s BgRT, which is designed to treat metastatic disease, could bring us a step closer to improving outcomes for these cancer types.”
BgRT uses biological emissions from a patient’s cancer cells created by injecting a small amount of a targeting molecule carrying a positron-emitting radioisotope known as a PET tracer, to guide external-beam radiotherapy (EBRT).
As the PET tracer binds to the tumour cells, it produces emissions that signal the cancer’s location. The RefleXion X1 machine detects these emissions using PET detectors and responds in real-time to direct BgRT to each tumour and destroy it, even in moving tumours.
The most commonly used PET tracer is 18F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG). It can detect many different cancer types. However, its performance in certain tumour types and organs remains limited, particularly for kidney and prostate cancers.
Telix said its new PET tracers are designed to target specific cancer types and are expected to be more accurate in this clinical setting.
“Telix’s cancer-specific PET tracers may provide a more complete and robust signal to guide BgRT for difficult-to-treat cancers of the prostate and kidney,” said Thorsten Melcher, chief business officer at RefleXion.
“This collaboration is an important step in providing proof-of-concept that PETbased tumour emissions can guide our BgRT using different tracers and in different cancer types.”
“The use of Telix’s cancer-specific PET tracers may enable us to guide RefleXion’s BgRT in patients with more advanced forms of prostate and kidney cancer,” said Telix CEO, Christian Behrenbruch. “This collaboration also allows us to leverage the investment we’ve made in these tracers by expanding both their indications and overall procedure volumes.”