Making drugs cheaper doesn’t always require pricey investments. A joint initiative by researchers from TU Eindhoven, the Dutch company Syncom BV and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital proves just that. What started out as a Bachelor project at TU/e laid the foundation for a much cheaper production of the promising cancer drug Z-endoxifen.
Making drugs cheaper doesn’t always require pricey investments. A joint initiative by researchers from TU Eindhoven, the Dutch company Syncom BV and the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek hospital proves just that. What started out as a Bachelor project at TU/e laid the foundation for a much cheaper production of the promising cancer drug Z-endoxifen.
Tamoxifen is known world-wide as a blockbuster chemotherapeutic drug for the treatment of breast cancer, but it is not always effective. Before it can exert its healing effect, the patient’s body must first convert it into the active component Z-endoxifen. Unfortunately, the conversion depends on the patient's genes, which can lead to a variable therapeutic response in patients. By not administering Tamoxifen but Z-endoxifen directly, this genetic dependence is circumvented and the medicine therefore becomes more effective and less toxic due to lower dosing. This has also been demonstrated by clinical trials in the US.
The application of Z-endoxifen had quite a hurdle to overcome: the drug’s production was only feasible in small amounts, which led to the exorbitant price of about ten thousand euros per gram. Researchers from TU/e and Syncom have now overcome this hurdle with an improved method to produce Z-endoxifen. During a Bachelor project attentive researchers from TU/e recognized that the HPLC purification method (high-pressure liquid chromatography) used was not at all necessary. Especially on a larger scale HPLC can be particularly expensive.
Read more at Eindhoven University of Technology
Photo: Lech-Gustav Milroy demonstrates the simple separation technique that took the place of the very expensive HPLC. In the background you can see HPLC equipment. CREDIT: Bart van Overbeeke.
