Telix Pharmaceuticals Limited (ASX: TLX) has entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with USA-based RefleXion Medical to investigate the clinical utility of combining the companies’ technologies to improve treatment for high-risk or recurrent prostate and aggressive kidney cancers.
RefleXion Medical is a therapeutic oncology specialist pioneering biology-guided radiotherapy1(BgRT) as a new modality for treating all stages of cancer.
Under the agreement, the parties will evaluate several new positron emission tomography (PET) tracers, including Ga-PSMA-11for prostate cancer and Zr-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, M.D., Ph.D., professor of radiation oncology and molecular radiation sciences, oncology and urology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA.
“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 F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG), which can detect many different cancer types. However, its performance in certain tumour types and organs remains limited, particularly for kidney and prostate cancers. Telix’s new PET tracers
“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, Ph.D., chief business officer at RefleXion.
“This collaboration is an important step in providing proof-of-concept that PET- based tumour emissions can guide our BgRT using different tracers and in different cancer types.”
Prostate specific membrane antigen (PSMA) imaging with Ga-PSMA-11 is suited for imaging high- risk or recurrent prostate cancer due to its ability to detect the spread of cancer outside the prostate bed. PSMA imaging is emerging as a potential new standard of care for detecting and staging prostate cancer, subject to approval by regulators.
For renal cancer applications, Telix’s Zr- Girentuximab, the first zirconium-labelled PET tracer in late-stage clinical development, targets carbonic anhydrase IX (CA9), an antigen that may differentiate renal cancer, including metastases, from benign disease.
“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 Christian Behrenbruch, Ph.D., CEO at Telix.
“This collaboration also allows us to leverage the investment we’ve made in these tracers by expanding both their indications and overall procedure volumes.”
