Mankind has been fighting against cancer for a long time, whether it is surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted drug therapy or even immunotherapy, mankind has been trying to find a more effective way to fight cancer, which can effectively fight cancer on the one hand and reduce the side effects on the body on the other.
Nowadays, cancer treatment is about precision treatment.
On the basis of precision treatment, a brand new treatment is about to be born, which is called BNCT, its full English name is boronneutron capture therapy, the Chinese translation is boron neutron capture therapy.
Many people see BNCT as the fifth therapy for cancer treatment, believing its discovery to be unprecedented, but the essence of BNCT is, in fact, radiation therapy.
The key to BNCT treatment is two steps, the first step is to inject the cancer patient with boron compound agent, boron has pro-cancer cell properties and will bind closely with cancer cells; the second step is to irradiate the tumor with neutron beam, boron will capture neutrons and produce alpha particles and lithium ions, they can disintegrate the tumor tissue directly from inside, the nuclear range of alpha particles and lithium ions is short, only a few microns, so they do not harm normal cells when strangling the cancer cells.
This shows that BNCT treatment is not only efficient, but also precise, which is the ultimate in radiotherapy.
Another advantage of BNCT treatment is that the treatment cycle is short, basically 30-60 minutes of irradiation to complete the strangulation process of cancer cells.
Cost-wise, the cost of one BNCT treatment is around $100,000, which is really cheap compared to $1.2 million for one CAR-T cell treatment.
Since BNCT must rely on boron drugs to complete, the entire cost is divided into two parts, part of the cost of boron drugs, part of the neutron cost, the cost of boron drugs will be more expensive, because the development of a highly effective boron agent requires a large amount of capital investment, the current commonly used boron drugs mainly include disodium undecylhydromercapto dodecaborate (BSH) and p-dihydroxyphenylalanine boron (BPA), two boron drugs have been approved by the FDA for clinical research, of which BPA was approved for marketing in Japan at the same time in March 2020, which is also the world's first approved clinical drugs for BNCT.
The unparalleled advantages shown by BNCT treatment have led our scientists to develop new boron drugs as well. In November 2021, Chongqing Gaojin Biological Company announced the successful development of GJB01, the first boron drug for melanoma, brain tumor, glioma and other malignant tumors that can be used for neutron precision treatment of tumors, which has completed API and formulation pharmacological studies and achieved mass production on the market in 2023.
This year is 2022, if all goes well, in the next year, I believe we will be able to see the domestic boron drug in the next year. This will be followed by the establishment of BNCT treatment centers, which I believe will be like a spring.
