U.S. company formed for individualized cancer treatment
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - George Mason University researchers announced on Tuesday the formation of a company to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients based on new technology that tracks protein activity in tumor cells.
The cancer researchers, Dr. Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin, formed Theranostics Health LLC to make available technology arising from proteomics, the study of protein activity in cells.
President and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Reilly said that rather than relying on current "one-size-fits-all" methods to choose chemotherapy agents for patients, information on the protein activity in tumor cells will allow doctors to select the drug best suited to attack the tumor.
The technology will analyze the cellular circuitry in tumor tissue and identify pathways that are driving the growth of cancer in an individual patient, Petricoin told reporters.
"The physicians will then be provided a new class of information about that patient's individual cancer. This will enable the physician to tailor the therapy based on the individual patients' tumor," Petricoin said at a news conference in Washington.
The technology was developed by scientists at George Mason, located in Fairfax, Virginia.
George Mason University owns the rights to the technology and is licensing it to the company, a university spokesman said.
Petricoin said the idea is to prescribe the right therapy to the right patient, with the aim of providing a higher treatment success rate while sparing patients unnecessary toxicity from drugs that are ill-suited for their tumors.
The company is based in Gaithersburg, Maryland.
The company initially is focusing on negotiating agreements with pharmaceutical companies to identify drug targets and assess anti-cancer drugs during trials, and in 2008 will begin to work with doctors and hospitals to apply its technology to patient care, initially for cancer and later on other ailments like diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.
The company is not publicly traded and is beginning with a $5 million initial financing round involving unspecified individual investors, officials said.
