Intracellular drug delivery project awarded EU grant

Dutch company OctoPlus Technologies, of Leiden, has entered into a strategic collaboration agreement with French company Diatos aimed at developing a universal and novel platform for targeted intracellular delivery of biological molecules, such as antibodies, proteins and genes or mixtures of these. OctoPlus is involved in the development of innovative polymer-based drug delivery technologies, while Diatos works on intracellular/intranuclear peptide-based drug delivery technology.

The project, Transpepdex, will bring together OctoPlus's patented biodegradable polymer technologies with Diatos's proprietary Peptide Vector (DPV) technology. It has been granted funding of €2.5m (US$2.5m) over the next five years by the Dutch and French governments under the Eureka scheme, a pan European network for market-orientated, industrial r&d.

Rapid progress in the areas of post-genomics and proteomics has resulted in an increasing number of new and important pharmacological targets that are localised inside the cell. Currently such drug targets are poorly accessible for many biological molecules.

OctoPlus's patented polymers have been shown to be capable of efficiently encapsulating either large molecules or DNA and can serve as universal carriers. Diatos's proprietary fully human peptide-based vectors can penetrate living cells and transport large quantities of low and high molecular weight molecules. The vectors are efficient in selectively delivering small molecules, nucleic acids, proteins (including antibodies) and polymer-based nanospheres into the cell cytoplasm and nucleus. In addition, OctoPlus's and Diatos's technologies can overcome the rapid intracellular elimination of foreign proteins that normally occurs within cells.