SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cancer Targeted Technology (CTT), a privately-held Seattle-based biotechnology company, announced that the NIH awarded CTT $1.44M on the second year of a competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase IIB grant. The three year grant commenced in 2019 and totals $3.3M and this second year of funding supports the current CTT1403 clinical trial.
The clinical trial, conducted at University of California, San Francisco with Dr. Rahul Aggarwal as Principal Investigator, is a 30-40 patient dose escalation/expansion trial in men with advanced castration-resistant prostate cancer. The trial is designed to show safety and efficacy of CTT1403 and is halfway through the initial dose escalation phase. To date there have been no safety issues with the drug and the pharmacokinetic data support the longer circulation time of CTT1403 in the blood stream as compared to other PSMA agents currently in clinical trials. "These PSMA-targeted agents are already transforming how prostate cancer is diagnosed and treated and we are very pleased that the NIH continues to support the development of these exciting new agents. CTT1403, with its longer circulating time and better tumor targeting characteristics, offers distinct advantages in this treatment arena providing the patient with cost and treatment benefits,” commented Dr. Beatrice Langton-Webster, CTT’s CEO and Principal Investigator on the grant. The unique chemical structure for CTT1403 was conceived of by Dr. Cliff Berkman, Professor at Washington State University (WSU).
CTT1403 targets Prostate Specific Membrane Antigen (PSMA) which is over-expressed on prostate cancer. Two features make CTT1403 unlike other PSMA-targeted drugs currently in development: 1) Due to a unique core scaffold, CTT’s molecules bind irreversibly to PSMA and this distinctive mode of binding enables rapid uptake of the drug within the tumor; and 2) CTT1403 is engineered to increase the circulation time of the drug in the body which further substantially increases the dose of drug that accumulates at the tumor sites. CTT1403 is labeled with the radionuclide Lutetium-177 and once delivered to the tumor, the radionuclide acts to destroy the tumor cells.
CTT completed two clinical trials at UCSF with CTT1057, the companion PET diagnostic imaging agent to CTT1403, with excellent safety and imaging results for both prostate cancer and renal cell carcinoma. CTT1057 is undergoing further development for prostate cancer by CTT’s licensing partner AAA/Novartis. CTT1057 and CTT1403 serve as a theranostic pair to both diagnose and treat solid tumors that express PSMA, and are being used together in the current clinical trial. More information on the trial can be found at clinicaltrials.gov.
