The Evolving Field of Radiopharmaceuticals

Radiopharmaceuticals have been traditionally used to treat superficial tumors, according to Mike Ritchie, CCO at Champions Oncology. As they have evolved, they have been used to treat internal tumors, and now the technology is transforming to be directed specifically so that they only impact the tumor and not other cells in the body.

“There's so much [that goes] into pharmaceutical development into making something that can be manufactured at scale. It can sit on a shelf for a while. We can administer it to a patient, and it behaves in the way that we want,” says Ritchie. “We're just learning how to apply what we learn from anybody drug conjugatesinto radio drug conjugates, so the chemistry of how to link this radio ligand to an antibody, something that will continue to evolve, and there's a real opportunity there to improve that, to improve the therapeutic activity.From the biology perspective, again, we're in our infancy and understanding what are the tumor types, or the molecular cohorts within a tumor that are more sensitive to radio ligands. Like any chemotherapy or any therapy, certain tumors will respond. Others will not. They'll develop resistance. And so really understanding the right cohorts of patients to treat is something that we're still learning, and I think we'll continue to learn as the clinical development of these programs evolves.”

Click the video above to watch the interview.

About the speaker

Mike Ritchie is CCO at Champions Oncology.