its partnership with Pierre Fabre. The collaboration is aimed at combining compounds using cancer-killing agents called “cytotoxics” developed by the French company with Cellectar’s drug delivery technology to construct new compounds.
The Pierre Fabre partnership can be seen as encapsulating Cellectar’s shift in strategy away from diagnostics and toward drugs under Caruso.
The company’s phospholipid ether-drug conjugate platform, which is designed to work with a variety of drugs to kill cancer cells and spare healthy ones, sets Cellectar apart from “other small oncology shops,” Caruso says.
“We have a delivery vehicle that we can add any number of payloads to, and create new drugs and intellectual property,” he says. “We want to get to a point where we can conjugate to our delivery vehicle reasonably quickly, and then find out in a shorter period of time whether or not you have an opportunity for a drug. It allows us to be more cost-efficient, and get more done quicker.”
