Meditech's contribution to cancer fight

Meditech Research has completed Phase I clinical trials of its anti-cancer therapy HyDox, indicating the treatment is safe for patients with breast cancer, renal carcinoma, sarcoma and prostate cancer.

HyDox is an anti-cancer therapy that combines Meditech's HyACT platform technology with well-established anti-cancer drug doxorubicin.

Meditech's research director, Assoc Prof Tracy Brown of Monash University, said the combined treatment could be up to 1200 times more effective than an anti-cancer drug on its own.

Brown, part of the team that invented the HyACT platform technology in the early 1990s, said it was based on a naturally occurring, non-toxic product. At Monash she discovered that a solution of hyaluronic acids, which is a sugar solution, will assist in delivering anti-cancer drugs more efficiently to its target tumour. HyAct is derived from hyaluronic acids.

"The cancer cell is able to take up more of the anti-cancer drug, killing off more cells," she said.

Normally when an anti-cancer drug is injected into a patient, it enters the cancer cell. The drug makes its way inside the cancer cell by the process of diffusion, or a drug transport protein carries it into the cell. When combined with the HyACT platform technology, the number of ways a drug can get into the cancer cell is increased, so it ultimately kills off many more tumour cells, according to Meditech.

Patients included in the Phase I HyDox trial were treated at the Centre for Developmental Cancer Therapeutics in Melbourne. In the treatment protocol, progressively larger doses of the HyDox combination were administered to a group of patients with advanced stages of cancer.

Data from Phase I safety trials is currently being formatted for future regulatory submission. Meanwhile, Meditech researchers are beginning to design Phase II clinical trial of HyDox.

More recently, Brown said Meditech combined the HyACT platform technology with anti-cancer drug 5Fluorouracil (HyFive). Both HyFive and HyDox Phase I clinical trials have been promising, according to the company, and it expects Phase II and III trials to follow soon.

Meditech plans to test a broad range of other leading, clinically accepted anti-cancer products in combination with its HyACT platform technology. A number of these other combinations are currently in pre-clinical testing.

Meditech listed on the ASX in 1996 and focuses on carbohydrate-based research. It has research arms at Melbourne's Monash University and Western Australia's Curtin University, which are developing treatments for a range of cancers, asthma, inflammatory disease and AIDS.