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Novel Targeted Cancer Therapy on show at Dubrovnik

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London; March 24th. Colin Hopper, one of Europe's leading practitioners of photodynamic therapy (PDT) believes PhotoBiotics' latest advance in targeting the technique will vastly improve the role PDT has to play in the treatment of cancer.

Now scientists, doctors, and clinicians will get the chance to share Hopper's enthusiasm for PhotoBiotics' research, and review the company's latest findings. They are presented at the first international conference of the European Platform for Photodynamic Medicine (EPPM-1), taking place this year in Dubrovnik, Croatia, between 24th and 28th March. Data on this innovative technology were recently published in the International Journal of Cancer.

In conventional PDT, diseased tissues containing light-activated drugs are illuminated with cold laser light. This converts oxygen into a highly toxic form which destroys any cells in its close proximity. To date, PDT has successfully treated head and neck, prostate and skin cancers; and compared to other cancer treatments, PDT leaves little cosmetic scarring and no possibility of drug resistance. But being non-targeted, conventional PDT cannot deliver the drugs specifically to tumours: they circulate in the body long after treatment, leaving patients acutely light-sensitised to skin damage.

PhotoBiotics latest proprietary research solves these problems. Called targeted PDT (t-PDT), the light-activated drugs are combined with special tumour-seeking proteins - antibody fragments - which specifically pin-point cancerous cells, and leave the body rapidly before they can cause skin damage. Based on its initial highly promising results, PhotoBiotics - a biotechnology spin-out company from Imperial College London - has filed four patents. Further pre-clinical studies are in progress, to take the technology forward into clinical trials, and expand the applications of t-PDT to many more cancers.

Dr Mahendra Deonarain, from Imperial College London's Department of Life Sciences and PhotoBiotics' chief scientist, explains: "We've shown that it's possible to use tumour-seeking antibody fragments to deliver highly potent light-activated drugs safely and accurately to the site of the cancer. This minimises the risk of healthy tissue getting accidentally damaged in the treatment process, and maximises the number of cancer cells that are destroyed. As an added bonus, and quite counter-intuitively, we've discovered it's possible to attach more of these drug molecules to small antibody fragments than to much larger whole antibodies, without destroying the useful targeting properties of the fragment itself." No wonder Colin Hopper is excited by the potential of PhotoBiotics' targeted PDT.

For more information please contact:

Dr Lionel R Milgrom, PhotoBiotics Ltd Press Office,
Tel: +44 (0)208 450 8760
Mob: +44 (0)7970 852156
Email: lionel.milgrom@hotmail.com

Notes to Editors:

The research paper is available here:-

1. Targeted photodynamic therapy with multiply-loaded recombinant antibody fragments
   The International Journal of Cancer, published online 31 October 2007.