Rhode Island’s largest hospital system is hoping that teaming up with a biotech company could help achieve a breakthrough in developing treatment options for liver and pancreatic tumors.
Lifespan Corp. says its new partnership with the Colorado-based TriSalus Life Sciences is more than just about providing space for a tenant to do lab research. It’s about advancing Lifespan’s stature as a cancer research institution and hopefully providing its patients with access to cutting-edge immunotherapeutic treatment that may be developed there, Lifespan says.
“We’re really excited by what this will mean in terms of improving health, creating jobs and putting us on the map in terms of research and innovation,” said Michael Henderson, vice president for research and chief research officer at Lifespan.
TriSalus recently occupied lab space in Lifespan’s Coro Building, located in Providence’s Jewelry District, giving the immunotherapy company clinical and research infrastructure. The arrangement has been in place for two months.
While dozens of research initiatives are taking place at Lifespan, this is the first partnership of its kind between Lifespan and an outside biotech company, Henderson says.
“We’re bringing the innovation to the Innovation District by engaging with these partners from the industry,” Henderson said.
And for TriSalus, the arrangement also is not simply about getting a good deal on real estate. TriSalus said the arrangement will allow it to embed itself in the Lifespan research community, which is intertwined with the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, as the company works to develop a novel treatment method for notoriously difficult-to-treat liver and pancreatic tumors using its unique drug delivery technology and an experimental drug called SD-101.
“We have no intention of being just tenants,” said Dr. Steven C. Katz, chief medical officer for TriSalus, who’s also a surgical oncologist at Brown Surgical Associates. “We’re looking to do this in a multifaceted way. We’re going to be participating in training and education. We’re going to collaborate with members of the Lifespan community and other laboratories, both pre-clinically and with our clinical trials.”
Katz said the partnership with Lifespan will be in place for at least the next two years, with the potential to go beyond that. The collaboration builds on the clinical and pre-clinical studies TriSalus has done at its clinical development office in Cranston to dismantle barriers to successfully treating liver and pancreatic tumors, namely the “intratumoral” pressure and tumor-induced immunosuppression that limit the effectiveness of treatments used for other tumors.
TriSalus has four employees working in the Coro Building, with another four at its clinical development office in Cranston that opened about two years ago.
“We’re also looking forward to bringing trainees or surgery residents into the lab to offer them educational and research opportunities to support their training, which is one of the elements that make a partnership like this mutually beneficial,” Katz said.
TriSalus technology allows an interventional radiologist to use a very long catheter placed in an artery in the patient’s groin or arm with a “dynamic valve” that the company calls the TriNav Infusion System, which opens and closes in sync with each heartbeat to optimize delivery pressure, driving more blood carrying the drug directly to the tumor.
“A lot of immunotherapy drugs aren’t safe to give to the whole body or don’t work well for these tumor types,” Katz said. “That’s why TriSalus is combining our delivery technology with the drug to get high concentrations within liver tumors and minimize the exposure to the rest of the body.”
The company now has two clinical trials at multiple sites across the country, both using the same drugs and TriNav technology, but one is for a rare form of cancer called uveal melanoma, which starts in the eye and spreads to the liver, and cholangiocarcinoma, which is a bile duct cancer that starts in the liver.
TriSalus trials taking place at Lifespan will involve treatment for cholangiocarcinoma, Katz says. TriSalus expects the trial to get underway sometime this summer, with about 40 patients receiving treatment in radiology suites at Lifespan.
“The early results are promising,” said Katz, referring to results from other sites. “We’re very optimistic, but it’s still relatively early in our clinical development program.”
Henderson says the partnership could lead to other partnerships with biotech companies, which could help reinvigorate the Rhode Island economy. Lifespan has additional space to build out for TriSalus if the research effort expands.
Henderson says Lifespan is in talks with two other companies about forming similar partnerships.
“Success begets more success, and research begets more research,” Henderson said. “Ultimately, what this leads to, and what we’ve been laying the groundwork for, is an innovation hub that would allow and attract more of the top-tier faculty and some of the best students in the country.”
Marc Larocque is a PBN staff writer. Contact him at Larocque@PBN.com.