A new technology that finds and illuminates tumors.
Jamey Weichert delves into science fiction to describe the cancer-fighting technology he’s developing with his company, Cellectar Biosciences.
“Do you remember in Star Trek when they would use a little handheld monitor that diagnoses everything that’s wrong?” he asks. “I’m not saying we can do that, but we’re getting kind of close — seriously.”
Weichert, an associate professor of radiology at UW-Madison with affiliations in medical physics and pharmaceutics, is an expert in cellular and molecular imaging. He formed Cellectar, a biotech startup with close ties to UW-Madison, about 15 years ago with the aim of developing a method to distinguish between malignant and benign tumors.
But Cellectar’s research has since expanded to include an optical imaging agent that can assist surgeons during tumor removal and a therapeutic agent that can deliver targeted doses of chemotherapy for cancer treatment. Fast-tracked by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the technology is currently being tested in a series of clinical trials taking place throughout the U.S.
John Maniaci
UW-Madison scientist Jamey Weichert founded Cellectar Biosciences in 2003.
“We never would have envisioned that we could have done half of this stuff when we started,” says Weichert, who is Cellectar’s chief scientific officer. “The technology is just amazing.”
The technology works thanks to a unique property of malignant cells: a high concentration of lipids, or fat molecules, in the cells’ plasma membranes. Cellectar’s cancer detection agent is injected into the body, where it then seeks out these cells and becomes trapped inside. Healthy cells, on the other hand, break the agent down until it’s eliminated.
Once Weichert realized the agent could stay in tumors for long periods of time, he knew it could aid treatment. Pharmaceuticals spend billions of dollars on cancer-fighting drugs that “don’t quite make it,” so Cellectar began experimenting to see if its agent could carry one of the failed chemotherapy drugs right into the malignant tumor cell.
“I call it diapeutics,” Weichert says. “It’s diagnostic imaging and therapy combined.”
The term is so new that Science Translational Medicine wouldn’t let Weichert use it when his research was featured on the cover of the academic journal last summer, since the editors had never heard of it before. In fact, the whole field of image-guided cancer treatment is so new, Weichert says, that the “FDA doesn’t even really know how to treat it yet.”
“See? Look at this,” he says, pulling out a binder from the inaugural meeting of the American Society of Image Guided Surgery, which took place Feb. 6, 2015. “The society is just forming. This is all new stuff.”
Cellectar’s agent can identify at least 60 types of cancers, and when bound to a fluorescent molecule, it can “literally make the tumor glow” under near-infrared light, allowing surgeons to pinpoint the exact margins of the cancer while they’re operating.
Better yet, the technology has proven effective in cancer stem cells, which play a major role in cancer reoccurrence and are notoriously difficult to eradicate, says John Kuo, an associate professor of neurosurgery at UW-Madison who studies the molecular biology of cancer stem cells.
“I was skeptical at first,” Kuo says. “Of course, I was proven wrong.”
Kuo is leading a phase-two clinical trial of Cellectar’s diagnostic imaging agent, testing at 10 sites across the country to evaluate the technology’s effectiveness in detecting brain cancer. Other upcoming trials will include breast cancer and multiple myeloma. In a best-case scenario, Kuo predicts the drugs will be on the market within five years.
While the FDA and researchers alike are excited by the promise of this technology, Weichert wants to be clear: It’s not going to work in all cancers. But hopefully it will work in some.
“We’re not curing cancer,” he says. “But we’re making a dent.”
