Marc Buchet
27 Feb 2024
Researchers from King’s College London and Erasmus MC in the Netherlands have called for further funding support in a recently published white paper to investigate the use of radioactive cancer-targeted drugs to improve cancer treatments.
The partnership combines the strengths of the UK and the Netherlands in science and health technologies to accelerate research and optimise patient care. Leveraging existing similarities in each country's healthcare systems would allow for better and faster clinical trials.
"Working on better understanding what different forms of radioactivity does to cancer cells as well as our healthy tissues can turn treatments that currently aim to prolong life by a bit or enhance a patient's quality of life to potentially a curative scenario where the person no longer has cancer. This is what we are passionate to help achieve"
Dr Samantha Terry, Reader in Radiobiology, King's College London
The white paper outlines three strategic recommendations to achieve this ambition:
Strategically allocate funding to enhance mechanistic understanding of targeted radioactive drugs.
Facilitate UK-NL clinical trials in targeted radionuclide therapies.
Coordinate training initiatives.
Radioactive cancer-targeted drugs
Radioactive cancer-targeted drugs stand at the forefront of a paradigm shift in cancer treatment, holding unparalleled promise to not only target cancer volumes visible through scans but revolutionize the very landscape of oncological care by killing tumour cells spread across the body, even those that are resistant to other treatments.
By harnessing the precision of radioactive elements, radioactive cancer-targeted drugs offer a transformative avenue, enabling personalized, potent, minimally invasive treatments that transcend the limitations of conventional cancer therapies and can spare healthy tissues. They can redefine the boundaries of what is possible in cancer treatment.