Therapy Areas: Oncology
Bicycle Therapeutics Paper Demonstrating Utility of Bicycles as Imaging Agents Published
19 February 2019 - - A paper by UK-based biotechnology company Bicycle Therapeutics has been published in the February 15th issue of Cancer Research, the company said.

The publication demonstrates the potential of Bicycles as a powerful platform technology for molecular imaging and diagnostics.

Future products based on this technology may help guide improved patient selection and better assessment of patient responses to treatment with cancer therapeutics.

Bicycle Therapeutics is developing Bicycles as medicines for cancer and, through collaboration, in other therapeutic areas such as respiratory, cardiovascular, haematology and infectious diseases. Bicycles are fully synthetic short peptides constrained to form two loops that stabilise their structural geometry.

This constraint is designed to confer high affinity and selectivity, and the relatively large surface area presented by the molecule allows targets to be drugged that have historically been intractable to non-biological approaches. 

Bicycles also have attractive pharmacokinetic properties with rapid and extensive tissue penetration, renal elimination and a tuneable systemic half-life.

The new paper highlights the utility of Bicycles as diagnostic or imaging agents.

This research, conducted in collaboration with the Division of Radiopharmaceutical Chemistry, German Cancer Research Center, suggests Bicycles could become effective agents for molecular imaging to inform the choice of targeted therapy and to monitor patients' responses to treatment.

Development of peptide-based imaging agents has been slow due to the lack of availability of suitable targeting agents with appropriate drug-like properties.

The proprietary Bicycle platform allows for rapid identification of high affinity binders to novel cancer antigens and their subsequent facile optimisation to molecules with optimised physicochemical and PK properties. Indeed, this technology may also allow other therapeutic payloads to be delivered effectively, such as radiopharmaceuticals.

Bicycle Therapeutics is developing a unique class of chemically synthesised medicines based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bicycle) product platform to address therapeutic needs unreachable with existing treatment modalities.

Bicycle's internal focus is in oncology, where the company is developing targeted cytotoxics (Bicycle Toxin Conjugates), targeted innate immune activators and T-cell modulators for cancers of high unmet medical need. 

Bicycles' small size and highly selective targeting deliver rapid tumour penetration and retention while clearance rates and routes of elimination can be tuned to minimise exposure of healthy tissue and bystander toxicities.

The company's lead programme, BT1718, is being evaluated in a Phase I/IIa trial in collaboration with Cancer Research UK.

The company's unique intellectual property is based on the work initiated at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, by the scientific founders of the company, Sir Greg Winter, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering work in phage display of peptides and antibodies, and Professor Christian Heinis.

Bicycle has its headquarters in Cambridge, UK, with many key functions and members of its leadership team located in the biotech hub of Boston, Mass.
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