A new consortium called Thera4Care has launched to provide better access to precision medicine for treatment of cancer in Europe.
More specifically it aims to broaden access to theranostics (also known as theragnostics), a combination of therapeutic treatment and diagnostic, which can be very beneficial for cancer patients. An example of theranostics could be where a molecule designed to bind to a tumor carries both a radioactive tracer to allow the cancer to be seen on a scan and another radioactive isotope that can help to destroy the cancer cells.
Theranostics are already available for treatment of some neuroendocrine and prostate cancer cases in Europe, but currently only in specialist centers. The Thera4Care consortium has $27.8 million (€25.3 million) in funding to date and includes 29 partners from academic and clinical sites, patient advocacy groups and companies developing cancer diagnostics, therapies or related technologies.
Funding for the project comes partly from Horizon Europe and partly from a group of public and private investors including EFPIA, EuropaBio, MedTech Europe, Vaccines Europe and a number of commercial members of the consortium. The project officially began at the beginning of October and will initially run for five years.
The consortium includes partners from 14 European countries and the U.S. It is coordinated by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome and includes other big academic centers around Europe such as Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam, Jules Bordet Institute in Belgium, University Clinic Essen in Germany, Gregorio Maranon General University Hospital in Spain, among others. Industry partners include GE HealthCare, Terthera, Minerva Imaging, Curasight, Aiforia, Exini Diagnostics and more.
Thera4Care is aiming to make theranostics more widely available in Europe and to institute more standardized methods for developing, detecting, and monitoring isotopes used to create theranostics.
It will initially focus on prostate, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers, as well as sarcomas. In addition to developing new isotopes, the consortium will develop new single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanners, which allow 3D imaging, to detect different types of radioactive emissions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being increasingly used in cancer diagnostics and to help track disease progression. The consortium plans to further develop AI capacity in this space, for example, as a clinical decision support tool to aid clinicians using theranostics in patients with prostate cancer. The consortium members also want to improve AI-based tumor quantitation and plan to develop methods to guide dosing for each patient based on this.
