U of T researcher and JLABS draw U.S. drug delivery startup to Toronto

Though Pendant originally licensed its polymer-based drug delivery technology from Vanderbilt University, the path to commercializing it soon led Glinter and his team to Christine Allen, a professor in U of T’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy.

“I courted her for about a year before she finally said yes,” says Glinter.

Allen's research focuses on new technologies for drug delivery. She's one of only a handful of people in North America familiar with Pendant's polymer technology, which promises to make drugs more efficient, longer lasting and opens the door to drug-impregnated implants and other medical devices.

Glinter calls her a “rock star” in the field.

Now the relationship is poised to grow even closer – and more productive – after Pendant was accepted into Toronto's JLABS life sciences incubator earlier this year. The 40,000 sq. ft. facility, which celebrates its one-year anniversary on Thursday, is housed on one of U of T’s floors in the MaRS West Tower and provides biopharmaceutical, medical devices and consumer digital health startups with shared lab and office space, as well as connections to experts, industry and investors.

Toronto's JLABS location, the first to be opened outside the United States, is the result of a unique collaboration between Johnson & Johnson Innovation, Janssen, U of T, MaRS Innovation, the Ontario government and several hospital partners. The number of resident startups calling Toronto's JLABS home has nearly doubled over the past 12 months, with nearly half of them boasting connections to U of T. They include WinterLight Labs, Nanovista, 6Biotech App4Independence and DNAstack.

Learn more about entrepreneurship and startups at U of T

The presence of JLABS in Toronto has added to the city's growing reputation as a life sciences hub, centred on U of T and its adjoining cluster of partner hospitals, research institutes and business incubators.

Global giant Johnson & Johnson “made a conscious decision to invest in Toronto life sciences,” says Glinter, when asked about the decision to move his company north (Glinter himself plans to remain in Nashville but will travel to Toronto several times a month). “That, to me, speaks volumes.”

Allen, meantime, envisions her graduate students and post-doctoral researchers moving seamlessly back and forth between Toronto's JLABS and her lab at U of T – precisely the type of private-public cross pollination that was envisioned by its founders. She says Pendant’s biodegradable polymer technology promises to vastly improve drug treatments for patients because it’s far more flexible than Poly (lactide-co-glycolide), or PGLA, the industry’s current polymer of choice.

“Think of all the drugs that are out there and how every single molecule is different,” Allen says. “But molecule-material interaction impacts drug formulation performance. It impacts its stability, the amount of drug you can incorporate and the drug’s release-rate.”

For patients, that could mean the difference between having one injection every three to six months, instead of every couple of days.

“It’s about making drugs more effective,” Allen says. “If you can give patients an injection, and they don’t have to come back to the doctor every day, week or month that improves their compliance and quality of life.”

Pendant’s polymer can also be stretched into thin sheets to be used for coatings on medical devices or fashioned into tiny nanoparticles. Another possible application: using the polymer to make transparent, drug-infused contact lenses that allow allergy sufferers to forgo eye drops.

Allen’s partnership with Pendant has been very much a two-way street.

She says working with the hard-driving Glinter and his team has injected her lab with a strong dose of business savvy and helped her better understand the market opportunities facing Nanovista, another startup that she co-founded with David Jaffray, a professor in U of T’s Faculty of Medicine and the director of the Institute for the Advancement of Technology for Health, as well as Jinzi Zheng, an assistant professor at U of T’s Institute of Biomaterials & Biomedical Engineering (IBBME). Nanovista makes an imaging agent that helps surgeons see tumours more precisely.

“I think JLABS has been great for Toronto,” Allen says. “It’s been huge for us, and it’s been huge for Canada. And we can make the most of this at U of T because we’re right across the street.”

Researchers convert microbubbles into nanoparticles to fight cancer

sgupta — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 11:15:45 +0000

Researchers convert microbubbles into nanoparticles to fight cancer sgupta Tue, 03/31/2015 - 07:15

Cutline

Professor Gang Zheng

Subheadline

New discovery hold promises for more precise tumour treatment

Researchers at the ��Ƶ have successfully converted microbubbles into nanoparticles that stay trapped in tumours to potentially deliver targeted, therapeutic payloads.

The discovery, published online March 30, 2015 in Nature Nanotechnology, details how Professor Gang Zheng and his research team created a new type of microbubble using a compound called porphyrin – a naturally occurring pigment in nature that harvests light.

In the lab in pre-clinical experiments, the team used low-frequency ultrasound to burst the porphyrin containing bubbles and observed that they fragmented into nanoparticles. Most importantly, the nanoparticles stayed within the tumour and could be tracked using imaging.

“Our work provides the first evidence that the microbubble reforms into nanoparticles after bursting and that it also retains its intrinsic imaging properties,” says Zheng, a professor of medical biophysics at U of T. “We have identified a new mechanism for the delivery of nanoparticles to tumours, potentially overcoming one of the biggest translational challenges of cancer nanotechnology. In addition, we have demonstrated that imaging can be used to validate and track the delivery mechanism."

Conventional microbubbles lose all intrinsic imaging and therapeutic properties once they burst, he says, in a blink-of-an-eye process that takes only a minute or so after bubbles are infused into the bloodstream.

“For clinicians, harnessing microbubble-to-nanoparticle conversion may be a powerful new tool that enhances drug delivery to tumours, prolongs tumour visualization and enables them to treat cancerous tumours with greater precision,” says Zheng, a senior scientist at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.

For the past decade, Zheng’s research focus has been on finding novel ways to use heat, light and sound to advance multi-modality imaging and create unique, organic nanoparticle delivery platforms capable of transporting cancer therapeutics directly to tumours.

The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Emerging Team Grant on Regenerative Medicine and Nanomedicine co-funded by the CIHR and the Canadian Space Agency, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, the International Collaborative R&D Project of the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, South Korea, the Joey and Toby Tanenbaum/Brazilian Ball Chair in Prostate Cancer Research, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation.

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