Tearing down the walls of brain cancer: delivery of radiopharmaceuticals across the blood-brain barrier

One in three children with brain cancer dies before reaching adulthood. Standard therapy involves opening of the skull for physical removal of the tumour. This highly invasive treatment comes with significant risks. Moreover, an incomplete resection will lead to relapse and decreased survival.

My aim is to develop an innovative, minimally invasive therapy approach that effectively and selectively delivers radiotherapeutic agents to brain tumours, with minimal side effects.My team (one PhD student and one postdoc) will design a new class of bispecific monoclonal antibodies (month 1-24) and use a peptide from scorpion venom (month 1-18) for the delivery of therapeutic radionuclides across the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

A pretargeting strategy will be employed to reduce radioactive doses to healthy tissues (month 1-48).This proposal uniquely integrates recent advances in radiology, oncology, chemistry and molecular biology into innovative research designs and novel treatment strategies.

The proposed strategy will limit side effects with a substantial chance of significant tumour reduction or complete tumour elimination.

The newly designed methodologies and agents could lead to breakthroughs in key applications of fundamental, preclinical and clinical interest and change the way we approach illnesses of the brain. The feasibility of the suggested approach is supported by preliminary data. This proposal will open up new fields of research in the basic and (pre)clinical setting.