The search for a cure for cancer continues tirelessly. Radioactive medicines – also known as radiopharmaceuticals – are promising and can mean a lot to people with breast or prostate cancer, among other things. However, it is still difficult to determine the quality of these medicines before they are administered. Kas Hogeboom, business developer at TU Delft & Erasmus MC spin-off AlphaPace, wants to provide an answer to this with their product for quality control, in order to use the full potential of these medicines.
This article was published earlier in the TTT Magazine.
The new, more effective forms of radiopharmaceuticals contain alpha emitters. This makes it difficult to determine the quality of the medicine. “The radioactive main particle, the nuclide, decays into smaller ‘daughter particles’,” Kas explains. “Doctors now use indirect measuring. They wait until the nuclide is in equilibrium with one of the daughter particles. The daughter particle is then measured to determine how the nuclide will react. So you are making an assumption. Furthermore, it takes a number of hours for those particles to be in equilibrium, while the longer you wait to measure, the less safe and less effective the drug is for the patient. That is why we have developed a product that makes direct measurement on the nuclide possible, so that you have a reliable picture of the quality within a few minutes.”
Safer and more precise
With their product, AlphaPace supports the doctor in assessing the quality of the medicine. “The method was originally used for something else, so the researchers in our team thought: ‘let’s just try to see if it works for this too’,” says Kas. That seemed to be the case and so they started developing the software and hardware for the device. Kas: “Radioactive medicines are not new, they have been around since the 1920s and 1930s. The production of isotopes is very expensive and scarce, but there has been a lot of development in recent years. Now it is important that we ensure that the quality of the medicines is good enough and you can only know that by measuring it properly. Our device can ensure that treatments can become safer and more precise.”
Development of prototypes
In order to develop the product, the AlphaPace team received the Take-Off 1 grant and a TTT MedTech voucher. “With that, we first started product development, which means we now have two working prototypes for technical validation. They are already showing very good results. We are also focusing on getting to know the market. For example, we did a pilot with the industry. Thanks to the TTT voucher, we were able to make really big steps. It gave us the space to buy materials and to spend time on developing and testing the prototypes. That was very important to us. In addition, winning the Philips Innovation Award (Rough Diamond) and the Gulliver Life Science Award gave us the opportunity to tell a wider audience about the potential of our technology and radiopharmaceuticals.”
Cancer-free in nine months
Eventually, AlphaPace wants to focus on developing various products for the quality control of medicines. For now, they are focusing on radiopharmaceuticals to exploit their full potential. “People often think that radiopharmaceuticals are dangerous, but they can also bring many wonderful things,” Kas explains. “In the long run, it could replace chemotherapy. There are still many risks associated with radiopharmaceuticals, but there are cases in which people are in the final stages of their lives – riddled with tumors – who are completely clean within nine months with one or two injections. In order to do that on a larger scale, you need to know exactly how much medicine you are going to administer and how many active ingredients are in it. That level of quality control requires money and we can use all the help we can get. So if there are people who want to do something with this, we would like to get in touch with them. The medicines are there, now we still have to take the necessary steps when it comes to quality control. We are happy to take on that.”