- Drug Delivery Partnership with Dr. Reddy´s Announced Today -

Investors and media alike use to think of drug delivery as a boring aspect of today’s biotech and pharma business. However, noting that 40% of marketed drugs have solubility issues that cannot be easily solved and about 70% of compounds in discovery are so insoluble that they do not have adequate and consistent gastrointestinal absorption to ensure efficacy, it is clear that the problem is not trivial.

One can look at the problem also from another angle: take, for example, diclofenac, a widely used drug for the treatment of pain and inflammation. In Germany alone, patients consume about 90 metric tons per year. As about 70% of the drug is excreted unchanged because of poor solubility, this means that each year 63 tons are released into sanitary wastewater and ultimately into the environment, as sewage plants cannot clear it from the water. It is long since known that Diclofenac causes damage to fish gills and kidneys.

Better solubility of drugs means improved bioavailability and less substance necessary for the desired therapeutic effect.  » Read more...

In several clinical trials, antibody company Micromet has demonstrated outstanding efficacy and safety of its bispecific BiTE antibodies which come with two binding sites: one for a cancer target and a second one for a T cell. As a result, T cells are recruited and guided directly to the tumor cell, initiating cancer cell death in a serial fashion.

In this week’s PNAS, researchers of the company demonstrate that the BiTE antibodies also can overcome the notorious resistance against conventional monoclonal antibodies arising in many cancer patients.

The researchers converted the anti-EGFR antibodies cetuximab (Erbitux) and panitumumab (Vectibix) into BiTE antibodies by adding the binding site for T cells. In animal models, these BiTE antibodies then showed a remarkably high potency (in the sub-picomolar range) against cancer cells with KRAS and BRAF-mutations which made them resistant to the original monoclonal antibodies.  » Read more...