2011 Summit

Producing Sponsor

(joint with Nanotech 2006)

Jennifer Rocha
955 Massachusetts Ave. #313
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: (774) 249-8514

Location:	NC, US
Speaker:	Stephen Barry
Title:	President
Primary Industry:	Pharma & Biotech
Executive Summary:	Cancer will claim the lives of close to 570,000 people in the US this year. While an arsenal of treatment modalities, including chemotherapy, targeted therapies, radiation therapy, and surgery are employed, success is often marginal and serious side effects are common. As a first step in improving treatment, chemotherapeutic regimens would be better harnessed by more effective localizing their activity to tumor tissues. As a next step, visualization of the targeted agents in the body (that is, the concentration and location in healthy tissue and in cancer lesions) would provide invaluable information on the suitability of a given targeting agent for an individual’s disease and on the progress of the treatment. Finally, in combination with better control and knowledge of chemotherapeutic location in the body, selective activation, or “switching on”, of chemotherapeutic agents in tumors could yield breakthrough cancer treatments. To this end, Alnis Biosciences is converging medical device and drug principles on the nano-scale, promising a better way to treat cancer. Specifically, a combination of magnetic fields and nano-sized composites of metal colloids, chemotherapeutics and polymer materials are used to both image tumors and to treat the disease.
Venture is:	A-Round