A team at the University of British Columbia’s substance acceleration facility in Canada is celebrating a major win, seeking a contract to produce a rare cancer drug that was previously dependent on nuclear waste.
The TRIUMF project has partnered with Ontario-based Fusion Pharmaceuticals to upgrade their facility to produce actinium-225, nicknamed “the rarest drug on Earth.”
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That rare radioisotope started making headlines about five years ago when a German man who was just weeks away from death, and suffering from multiple cancerous tumors, was given four treatments of it.
Eight months later, the tumors had disappeared.
“We see that cancer has been fundamentally eradicated in some cases, so these are very early results but very encouraging ones,” TRIUMF Innovations CEO Kathryn Hayashi told Global News , about the capacity of the isotope.
But actinium-225 is very rare. To date, the global supply of the material has come from U.S. radioactive waste.
In 2015, Paul Schaffer, one of the directors of TRIUMF’s lab, realized that the foundation was producing large amounts of actinium-225 through the use of its high-energy cyclotron facility for research.
“The cyclotron accelerates proteins to three-quarters of the speed of light using electromagnets. So it’s basically firing down a beam line and hitting a railway line, ”Hayashi explained.
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“It basically explodes and forms hundreds of different isotopes, one of which is actinium-225. ”
Hayashi says the facility has the theoretical potential to scale to produce thousands of doses of the drug.
This is particularly encouraging, as actinium has been shown in early research to be effective in killing cancer cells, leaving healthy parts of the human body unaffected.
“It is very difficult to develop resistance to actinium,” explained Dr. Francis Bernard, vice president of research at BC Cancer.
“So we expect this to be an effective third-quarter line treatment, in addition to the other treatments available.”
The first step for TRIUMF is to develop a supply chain.
In phase two clinical trials will be rolled out in British Columbia, possibly within 18 months.
“It’s a bit like sending a man to the moon or a woman to the moon,” said Bernard.
“You know how to get there, you just have to improve facilities.”
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