Avelas Biosciences
Avelas is a clinical-stage drug-device company pioneering the field of fluorescence imaging for real-time cancer detection. Avelas is focused on the development and commercialization of pegloprastide (also referred to as “AVB-620”), a novel fluorescent imaging agent used in combination with a fluorescence camera system for real-time cancer detection and visualization during surgery. The goal of intraoperative image-guided surgery with pegloprastide is to increase the precision of cancer surgery and improve treatment outcomes for patients by fluorescently identifying cancer, in real-time during surgery, on the surfaces of excised tissue or residual cancer in the tumor bed not otherwise detected by surgeons and potentially left behind in a patient during an operation.
Company details
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- Business Type:
- Manufacturer
- Industry Type:
- Medical Equipment
- Market Focus:
- Internationally (various countries)
About Us
In a prospective registration study in a broad population of women with primary, nonrecurrent breast cancer, use of pegloprastide during breast conserving surgery correctly identified cancer in up to 75% of women with positive margins who may have otherwise been candidates for a reoperation.
Beyond breast cancer, Avelas has plans to explore the use of pegloprastide in a subset of other non-breast cancer surgeries, such as ovarian, colorectal, head and neck, melanoma, and sarcoma.
Avelas has developed pegloprastide based on its molecular-delivery platform which uses the Company’s proprietary Activatable Cell Penetrating Peptide (ACPP) technology and a tumor’s inherent pathological biochemistry to specifically target cancer tissue and deliver fluorescent cargo to tumors. The founding technology for Avelas was derived from the lab of 2008 Nobel Prize Laureate, Dr. Roger Y. Tsien at the University of California, San Diego. Pegloprastide’s structure, properties and ACPP delivery technology have been reported in eleven peer reviewed publications and have over 2,800 citations in other medical publications.
Our Mission
Avelas’ mission is to increase the precision of cancer surgery and improve long-term outcomes for patients by providing real-time cancer detection with pegloprastide.
Surgery is often the first-line treatment for cancer patients. However, despite advances in radiologic and surgical techniques, surgeons continue to rely mainly on eyesight and palpation to determine the extent of cancer. Too frequently, surgeons will not know where the tumor begins and ends while operating. This uncertainty can lead to incomplete detection and removal of cancer, which most often is determined when histopathology reports become available days or weeks after a procedure.
The presence of residual cancer after a surgery is referred to as a positive margin and is increasingly recognized as a significant unmet need across numerous cancer surgeries. In breast cancer, the lead investigational indication for pegloprastide, women with positive margins are more than 2x likely to have cancer recurrence than those with negative margins. Therefore, the presence of positive margins results in a significant number of women each year returning for a repeat (re-excision) surgery with the goal of achieving negative margins. Current re-excision rates for lumpectomies in the US are estimated to be between 20-40%, with more than 50,000 women annually returning to the operating room for a subsequent breast cancer surgery.
Ultimately, Avelas’ goal is to empower surgeons to operate once with pegloprastide, thereby improving outcomes for patients and providing substantial benefit to the entire healthcare system.