‘Very exciting’: Halifax life sciences company releases promising cancer study results

Crystal Garrett speaks with a Halifax doctor who is at the forefront of a promising new cancer treatment trial.

A Halifax-based life sciences company has released the results of a promising cancer therapy study.

Sona Nanotech used a treatment called targeted hyperthermia therapy (THT) on patients with metastatic melanoma who were not responding to immunotherapy.

“We’ve taken gold nanoparticles, just nanorods, one billionth of a metre long, and inserted them into tumours and then we pass your infrared red light over them and the nanorods convert the light into heat and we use warm heat to change the core of the tumour so that it is more visible to the immune system,” explains Dr. Carman Giacomantonio.

The researcher and surgical oncologist says he’s been looking at ways to manipulate cancers for a very long time and the core of them is the problem.

“The core is like a fortress; it prevents things from getting in and from destroying the cancer. And one of the ways that I learned to change the microenvironment, which is the core, is to heat it. And so I’ve done, as a surgical oncologist, I’ve heated bodies, heated limbs, and we knew that heat would cause cancer cells to stress and that stress will lead to death,” he said.

And changing that microenvironment appears to have good results. Sona Nanotech says eight out of 10 patients who took part in the trial experienced measurable tumour responses within two weeks of treatment and six of those eight showed complete tumour elimination.

Giacomantonio says the study will continue in the spring.

“We hope to start that trial and go into a more in-depth analysis of what the responses are and particularly when it doesn’t work, why didn’t it work? And we’re moving into other cancers. This is not just a melanoma therapy, it’s a cancer therapy,” he says.

Sona Nanotech hopes to start exploring head and neck cancers within a year. THT could also have an impact on colon cancer, rectal cancer, advanced melanomas, bladder cancer, and prostate cancer.

Giacomantonio says while the implications are “very exciting,” it’s difficult to know when cancer patients could rely on the therapies for treatment.

“There’s lots of things. We have to prove that it’s as good or better than other therapies and we think we can do that,” he said. “It’s a three-to-five-year process before we have a single cancer that we can actually get an indication for.”

A full webinar on Sona Nanotech’s study can be found on its YouTube page.

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