ITRI, Dutch biotech firm sign exclusive licensing agreement

The promising G-Technology was pioneered by an expert team of drug delivery scientists from ITRI. For the brain drug targeting company to-BBB, the worldwide license agreement opens a gateway to treatments of devastating brain diseases.

“The G-Technology from ITRI is a major breakthrough for the targeting of drugs to the brain. No other technology is able to achieve the transport across the blood-brain barrier with the favorable pharmacokinetic and safety profile of the G-Technology,” says Pieter Gaillard, Chief Scientific Officer of to-BBB.

The G-Technology is based on the endogenous tripeptide glutathione and targets to glutathione transporters which are highly expressed on the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is a tight seal of endothelial cells that line the blood vessels of the brain and selectively allow the entry of only certain molecules into the brain. Amongst these is glutathione, which has favorable antioxidant-like properties and plays a central role in detoxification of intracellular metabolites. Of special relevance for validation studies is that the glutathione transporters are conserved across all mammalian species, including humans.

Glutathione is found in high levels in the brain and cerebral vasculature and is considered to be safe to administer to humans for a prolonged period of time. Glutathione is marketed as functional food ingredient and antioxidant, and applied as supportive therapy in cancer and HIV treatments and as excipient in parenteral formulations. Glutathione coated on the surface of nanosized liposomes was shown to be well tolerated and to effectively deliver several classes of drugs to the brain in a range of experimental studies reproducibly performed by independent laboratories.

A vast number of more than 30 million people worldwide suffer from a major neurological disease with hardly any hope to be cured. It is not the lack of potentially effective therapies causing this personal and economical burden. It is the fact that more than 95% of potential treatments are unable to get into the brain due to the blood-brain barrier (BBB).

The key technology enables potential treatments for brain diseases to cross this barrier. The G-Technology can deliver new treatment options for the millions of patients suffering from currently non-treatable brain diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, viral encephalitis, stroke and brain tumors.

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