David Fairen-Jimenez on Reducing Toxicity With Highly Targeted Polymeric Nanoparticles

With a focus on improving drug delivery, David Fairen-Jimenez, PhD, and his company, Vector Bioscience Cambridge, have carved out their corner of precision medicine with their platform that utilizes high-porosity nanomaterials to deliver targeted treatments with less toxicity.

Fairen-Jimenez, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Cambridge in the UK, and CEO and co-founder of Vector Bioscience Cambridge, spoke to Biopharm International during the Precision Medicine World Congress to provide an overview of the company's technology and platform.

"We have a family of materials...essentially some polymeric nanoparticles that are called porous coordination polymers, which are extremely porous materials. In a single gram of material—we're talking about several 1000s of square meters—these materials can encapsulate different drug molecules inside the porosity, while we have a very, very tiny amount of vehicle, and this means the toxic effects of these vehicles are really, really low," Fairen-Jimenez said.

The company's pipeline is focused on oncology, where they are currently exploring at least seven molecules, two of which have advanced to in vivo studies in pancreatic and breast cancer.

"We have a huge amount of flexibility that is very difficult to reproduce with other types of nanoparticles," he said. "On the one hand, we have been able to... encapsulate molecules so we have a slow release for one month, for example, inside the body. We have other examples where we have been able to put RNA molecules to knock down the expression of proteins, and that's a great advantage against any other technology. The bottleneck for RNA therapies, many times, is the transport of these RNAs inside the cells, outside of the lysosomes. So being able to really unlock the potential of these RNAs has been great."