ICR London and EXACT Therapeutics in collaborating project

Improving Targeted Drug Delivery to Tumours using Ultrasound and Acoustic Cluster Therapy; an Organ-in-Chip Approach

Tiondre Brown, a medical student at Imperial College London, has been awarded an intercalated PhD project under the supervision of Prof Jeff Bamber, Dr Emma Harris and Prof Udai Banerji at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Prof Darryl Overby at Imperial College London. Dr Andrew John Healy, who is Co-founder, Co-inventor, and former Chief Scientific Officer at EXACT and now holds an advisory position in the company, will be a collaborating supervisor. The project, in collaboration with Exact Therapeutics AS, begins in July 2023, and will be part of the Cancer Research UK Clinical Academic Training Programme funded under the Cancer Research UK Convergence Science Centre of Imperial College London and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR).

Exact Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing Acoustic cluster therapy (ACT®), which is a technology platform for therapeutic enhancement targeted by ultrasound. The company has worked closely with Prof Bamber’s team on the application and evaluation of ACT®, and the technology is currently under clinical evaluation in a phase I/II clinical trial at the joint Drug Development Unit at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and the ICR, with Prof Banerji as Principal Investigator.

ACT® enhances anti-cancer drug effectiveness by overcoming physical barriers in a tumour, increasing the proportion of an intravenously injected drug that reaches the cancer cells. This project aims to improve understanding of the mechanisms by which ACT® does this to allow optimisation of the ultrasound and other variables to maximize the effect on each tumour’s microscopic structure. Prof Overby’s novel organ-in-chip technology, which preserves the viability and function of tumour explants by perfusion, is an essential enabler for the studies that should ultimately translate into patient benefit by identifying cancers that are best suited to ACT® treatment with optimised parameter settings to maximise the therapeutic effect.