Startup Company Profile
Bone-Rad Therapeutics, Inc.
|
1 Muir Beach Circle |
Employees: 4 |
||||||
|
Faculty Inventors:
|
|||||||
The natural progression of most cancers is to spread to bone, especially to the spine. These metastatic tumors are notoriously common and can cause pain, spine fractures, and neurologic problems, seriously reducing quality of life. Treatment of these tumors is challenging because two issues must be addressed—the cancer must be treated with radiation therapy and strength must be restored to the bone. This is especially crucial in weight bearing regions of the skeleton like the spine and hip, where tumors can weaken the bone to such an extent that the bone fractures just under the body's own weight.
Therefore, conventional treatment for tumors in the spine occurs in two parts—a minimally invasive surgical procedure (kyphoplasty or vertebroplasty) to restore strength to the bone, followed by radiation therapy. The surgical procedure has a low rate of complications, is very effective, and can be performed in an outpatient surgery center under local anesthesia, with the patient awake. Even multiple levels of the spine can be treated successfully.
Despite the success of this surgery, the radiation therapy following surgery currently has a number of important shortcomings. As the spine is irradiated to treat the tumors, the spinal cord and nerves are also exposed to radiation. The spinal cord and nerves can tolerate some radiation exposure, and special techniques can be used to minimize exposure to the spinal cord. Even so, the presence of the spinal cord often limits the radiation that can be safely delivered to treat the tumors. In addition, the current form of radiation therapy is inconvenient for the patient, typically requiring about 10 outpatient visits, which negatively impacts the patient's quality of life.
Therefore, Bone-Rad Therapeutics, Inc. aims to provide an improved alternative to conventional treatment that will improve patient care and quality of life for the hundreds of thousands of patients per year who develop painful tumors in the spine.
Bone-Rad Therapeutics, Inc. aims to develop and market radioactive bone cement as an innovative, improved, and cost-effective treatment paradigm in the management of cancer tumors in bone. This patent-pending technology, developed at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) by members of the Bone-Rad Therapeutics team, promises to provide a more focused radiation therapy to tumor-involved regions of bone, resulting in less radiation exposure to surrounding normal tissues, while simultaneously augmenting the strength of the affected region. Administered in a single procedure, radioactive bone cement will also eliminate the 10 hospital visits typically needed for conventional radiation treatment, making it cost-effective while dramatically improving patient care and quality of life. Through UCI, the members of the Bone-Rad Therapeutics team have already been awarded a $760,000 grant from the Department of Defense (DOD) Breast Cancer Research Program for research and development of this technology for treatment of tumors in the spine. The initial product line will consist of Bone-Rad Radioisotope, Bone Cement, Cement Mixer, and Cement Injector System. The latter three items will be packaged together with private-label spine surgery equipment in a kit that will be sold to hospitals and used by treating physicians. The corporation will take the technology through the required testing period and once FDA market approval has been obtained, a decision will be made to license or sell the technology to the most appropriate company, or to manufacture the products.
