SBIR PHASE 1 - TOPIC 394 - COMBINATORY TREATMENT MODALITIES UTILIZING RADIATION TO LOCALLY ACTIVATE OR RELEASE SYSTEMICALLY DELIVERED THERAPEUTICS.

Photodynamic therapyPDTutilizes light beam to activate photosensitizers to produce cytotoxic reactive oxygen speciesROSand it has been proposed as a potent treatment to combine with Radiation TherapyRTespecially for the idea of using X ray beam to locally activate PDTXPDTMajority studies about XPDT have used nanoscintillators as the X ray transducer to activate photosensitizersHoweverthe materials used to prepare nanoscintillators usually consist of rare earth or heavy metal elements which possess a significant drug safety issue and their biocompatibility and tolerability in humans have not been studiedthus limiting the clinical translation of such strategiesCompared to the nanoscintillator based XPDTCherenkov radiation induced by X ray provides an alternative approach to realize X PDTIt has been demonstrated that biological tissues such as tumors can produce Cherenkov luminescence when treated by either radionuclides or external X ray beams and the technique advances have enabled the clinical application of Cherenkov radiation for tumor tracking in patientsThere are numerous evidences that photosensitizers can be activated by high energy X ray to generate ROSBased on thisZymeron develops a multi functional formulation to allow a novel combinational treatment modality of X ray based RT and PDT