Ondine Biomedical, Inc

Ondine Biomedical Inc. is a proud supporter of the mission and goals of the PanAmerican Photodynamic Therapy Association. Launched last month, the Association’s purpose is to galvanize the basic science and expertise of photodynamic therapy in the Americas. This will help encourage the study and practice of PDT in the treatment of animal and human diseases.

Many of you may not know that photodynamic therapy has been around for centuries. In fact, the earliest recorded treatment using a photosensitizing agent and a light source occurred in ancient Egypt over 3,000 years ago. Vegetable and plant substances were used as photosensitizers and sunlight was used as the light source. Patients suffering from skin diseases such as vitiligo had the photosensitizers topically applied to the damaged area, and the resulting photochemical reaction restored their tissue to a healthier state. In some cases, it even helped repigment their skin to its normal color.

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Connah Broom is a very luck young man. Diagnosed at the age of four with stage 4 neuroblastoma, Connah was given six months to live. Eleven tumours had developed on his neck, stomach, legs, and areas near his heart. Seven months of chemotherapy failed to improve his condition and surgery was no longer an option as the tumours were located too close to vital organs. That was when Connah’s family learned that he had only a few more months to live. According to Debbie Broom, Connah’s mother, “A doctor told us to take Connah home and enjoy our remaining time with him.”

The family then turned to photodynamic therapy (PDT), a treatment proven to be effective in killing cancer. Connah’s treatment consisted of taking a pill containing a photosensitizing agent and then activating this agent with light. A powerful reaction was then initiated, which killed the cancerous cells while preserving the surrounding healthy tissue. Amazingly, after ten months of PDT  treatment, ten of Connah’s eleven tumours have now disappeared. “This is the one miracle in my entire career,” said Connah’s GP, Dr. Eamon Jessop, “He’s doing incredible well, it’s staggering.” To hear Connah’s story, please watch the video below:

Connah from Matt Hunt on Vimeo.

Update: Carolyn would like to thank everyone for their well wishes. She is currently at home recovering from knee surgery and we expect her to make a full recovery soon. Please send donations to the family of the pilot, Luc Fortin, to support his 16-month old daughter – inmemoryofluc@shaw.ca

Miracles really do happen. On Thursday October 27^th, Carolyn Cross (our CEO, Chairman, and dear friend) survived a deadly plane crash. On a chartered flight headed to Kelowna, Carolyn knew something wasn’t right when the pilot told passengers there was an oil leak and they were returning to the airport. “I looked at his hands and they were shaking, trembling,” Carolyn said in an interview from her hospital bed, “At that moment I knew we were going to die.” Carolyn then calmly took out her phone and began typing out farewell messages to her three young kids, “Something that they would remember me by, that I could have peace that I had said my goodbyes.”

Seconds later, Carolyn’s plane crashed on a busy road about 900 meters short of the runway. “We crashed and I immediately looked outside because I was at a door window and it was full of flames outside. So I couldn’t go out. It smelled full of gasoline….I went to get up and I could not walk. It was as if I had no legs, as if they were blown off. And I thought of my children, and God and the universe gave me the energy and I got up to the door. I said I don’t know what I am going to do now because I can’t get out of the plane, my legs, I can’t get out of the plane.”

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Why doesn’t photodynamic therapy (PDT) cause any noticeable damage to human tissue? After all, the reaction causes damage to the bacterial membrane, and human cells have membranes as well.

This was a topic that really grabbed my attention when I first learned about photodynamic therapy.   How is it possible that with the creation of highly reactive molecules are we only limiting cellular destruction to bacterial cells? Although there may be a few different answers to this question, the primary solution is that we are not. Don’t be afraid and swear off photodynamic therapy right away, here me out first. Photodynamic therapy is primarily used as a treatment option for cancers. This treatment is used on cancerous tumours formed in esophageal cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, as well as many different types. The photosensitizer is accumulated in the tumour either by direct injection or utilizing mutations of the cancerous cells that concentrate the photosensitizer inside the cell. After light is applied, the tumour cells are damaged, but the healthy cells are not greatly harmed. Why? One trait of a cancerous growth is the mutation of certain DNA repair enzymes. (Have a look at this Wikipedia article to give you a small background on DNA repair enzymes) These repair enzymes are responsible for fixing oxidative damage problems caused by free radicals. Scientific researchers, knowing this small fact about most cancerous tumour cells, use PDT and reactive oxygen species to their advantage. A healthy human cell can take some free radical “abuse”, but a tumour cell can only take so much until the cell dies. This fact, coupled with selective photosensitizer accumulation within tumour cells, makes PDT an excellent treatment option in some forms of cancer.

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Many bacteria capable of causing life-threatening infections are now resistant to a wide range of antibiotics.  It is essential, therefore, that alternatives to antibiotics are developed for use in the prevention and treatment of such infections. Light-activated antimicrobial agents (LAAAs) are one possible new approach to this problem. LAAAs are compounds that display no antimicrobial activity in the dark but, when exposed to light of a certain wavelength, can kill microbes in the vicinity.  One of the essential attributes of any antimicrobial agent, including a LAAA, is that it be effective at low concentrations so as to reduce the risks of any toxicity to the patient.

The new LAAAs as seen through a very powerful electron microscope. The diameter of each particle is approximately 0.000000005 metre.

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December 14, 2010 was a really special day for me. I was in my office when I got the news – I had been accepted to Harvard Business School’s MBA program. Now, as my time at Ondine comes to an end, I’ve been asked to recount my story, and how I got to the enviable position of being able to leave a job that I love for an unbelievable opportunity.

I began at Ondine in January of 2008 after returning from a backpacking trip around Western Europe. I had secured the internship the summer beforehand, and viewed it as the perfect opportunity. I had always been interested in business, but I was convinced that I would be attending dental school, having written the entrance examinations during my undergraduate degree. Ondine, having a commercially available dental product, was the hybrid I was looking for. So, armed with only my UBC degree in Cell Biology and Genetics, I set off to see what business was all about. Read more »

I’ve talked before about how photodisinfection works, but I want to take a moment to clarify what I think are the three most common myths about the technology we’re working on here at Ondine.

It’s Not That New

Our products are often met with scepticism because people are unfamiliar with photodisinfection as a treatment, or even as a science.  Truth be told, photodisinfection has existed for over 100 years[i], and the research behind it has a solid foundation in the literature extending back well over 20 years.  Check out this short reference list if you don’t believe me. So why, with all this research, is photodisinfection only creeping into the marketplace now?  The simple answer is that, until Ondine, most companies have been a little hesitant to put the work in to make it a success.  Photodisinfection requires a lot from a company: an engineering team for a light source, a microbiology team for the preclinical tests, a chemistry team for the careful formulation of the photosensitizer and a regulatory team to get the product cleared for use in trials and approved clinical use.  When you add in quality control, finance, administration, and sales and marketing, you can see the inherent challenges facing a company. You can trust me that the science is there (and growing), and Ondine has proven that it has what it takes to make these products a reality.

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Photodynamic Therapy in the Operating Room

Breakthroughs in Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) occur everyday. On Tuesday, it was announced that a new non-surgical PDT-based procedure for the treatment of HPV and cervical pre-cancerous lesions has been accepted for use in a phase 2 trial by the FDA. Advancements like this help validate the need to continue exploring PDT as a potential treatment for cancer. Testing of this procedure is scheduled to begin this spring, and will occur in multiple trial centers across the US and Europe.

Unlike previous PDT applications in cancer, this is a new therapeutic treatment that uses advanced LED technology in a self-powered, single-use device that can be deployed inside a body cavity. This disposable device will be administered by a gynecologist or colposcopist and left in place for up to 24 hours. During this time, the patient can leave the hospital and continue her daily activities before eventually removing the device on her own. Read more »

The key features of aPDT can be summarized as follows [¹]:

• Broad spectrum of action, since one photosensitizer can act on bacteria, fungi, yeasts and parasitic protozoa
• Efficacy independent of the resistance pattern of the given microbe
• Extensive reduction of pathogen counts in minutes, without damaging host cells
• No selection of resistant strains after multiple treatments
• Readily available, non-toxic photosensitizers
• Relatively low-cost light sources for activation of the photosensitizing agent
• No cytotoxic effects on key sensitive host cells such as human keratinocytes or fibroblasts

The treatment of topical infections has traditionally relied upon antibiotics in either topical or systemic dosage forms. However, the inexorable increase in antibiotic resistance (including to vancomycin and other glycopeptides) has led to the spectre of potentially untreatable infections, and this in turn has led to the development of alternative antimicrobial approaches based on light-activated chemotherapy ^{2, 3}. Photodynamic Disinfection (called antimicrobial PDT by the scientific community) is an extension to traditional photodynamic therapy (PDT) which was originally focused on oncotherapy and intra-ocular indications, utilizing systemically-administered photosensitizers. Read more »