Cancer is a deadly disease that kills, or effects, millions of people around the world annually. For some patients if the disease doesn’t kill them, the constant injections of toxic chemotherapy drugs could cause severe side effects. However, this era of toxic chemo drugs running throughout cancer victim’s bodies can come to a halt thanks to Kevin Sill PhD, chief science officer at Intezyne Technologies, Inc. (Tampa, Flor.), and his development of the IVECT Method.
Sill’s journey to co-founding Intezyne, and developing the IVECT Method and cross-linking technology behind it, started during his graduate work at the Univ. of Massachusetts (UMass). During his graduate studies, Sill was approached by his colleague, Habib Skaff, about starting a company with him. Taking this opportunity, Sill and his colleague discussed how they could use their skills in polymer chemistry to make an impact and better other’s lives. After looking at literature, and current unmet needs, they decided to focus on nano-scale drug devices such as polymer micelles.
Although the area of using synthetic polymers for drug delivery has been around since the 1970s, there still were issues that needed to be resolved. The two main issues were the stability of the micelle after administration to the body, and the ability to target specific tissue with the micelles. Sill designed Intezyne’s IVECT Method to overcome these limitations by creating a stabilization technology that allows the micelle to remain intact within the blood stream for long periods of time, thus permitting the targeting groups to attach and anchor the micelle to the site of disease. Furthermore, the IVECT Method is versatile enough to encapsulate a wide range of therapeutics which include: small molecules, magnetic nanoparticles for contrast agents, and genetic materials (sRNA and DNA).
Sill’s initial idea for his IVECT stabilization technology came to him while reading a paper that had been out since the 1930s that defined a reaction that had the attributes he was looking for. The problems facing other nano-scale micelle delivery systems were that once administered to the body, and upon interacting with blood proteins and phospholipids, the micelle would fall apart. Once the micelle falls apart, you lose all benefits of these carriers and the toxic drugs seep throughout the body with a chance of missing the diseased tissue.
The IVECT Method focuses around polymer micelles, which are typically made from diblock copolymers. With a diblock copolymer there is a part of the block that hates water and a part that loves it. When assembled, and placed in water, the water hating segment will be located in the core and the water loving segment will be outside, making a core shell structure. By encapsulating a high performance drug, like any of the common chemotherapy drugs, into the core of the micelle, with an outer coating of PEG, which is invisible to the body, the nano-sized micelle drug carrier will circulate throughout the body.
However, Sill took the idea of a diblock copolymer a step further, creating structural elements of a triblock copolymer by adding a third, stabilization block. The stability of this targeted triblock copolymer, the key element behind the IVECT Method, allows diseased tissues to receive high amount of the drug, without the chemicals rushing through the bloodstream of their body. One might say he found the “magic bullet.” By attaching targeting groups to the this triblock copolymer, Sill was able to take advantage of both active and passive targeting technologies that allow the delivery capsule to circulate within a person’s body until it contacts the disease, in this case cancer, and use the targeting ligands to hone in on the area and localize.
It is Sill’s innovation of his reversible cross-linking technology that stabilizes the micelle and allows for release of drug only at the tumor site. What Sill’s cross-linking technology does is connects all polymer chains, with the PEG and targeting agents/groups as the shells and the chemo drug within the micelle core, together in order to keep them bound while the micelle circulates. Thus, this cross-linking technology traps the toxic drug and does not allow it to enter the blood-stream prematurely. And, by attaching targeting groups, the delivery agent goes straight to the diseased, timorous tissue.
As Chief Science Officer at Intezyne, not only is Sill the primary designer of the IVECT Method and the innovator of the cross-linking technology behind it, but he oversees a team of PhD scientists and interacts/conducts everyday research. He also is heavily involved with the intellectual property and filing for the company. Currently, Sill is responsible for the development of the IND submission and package and product timelines for the four new drug products based upon his IVECT Method. He and his team are working on IT-141, encapsulated SN-38 for metastatic colorectal cancer, which is positioned for a Q2 2010 IND filing; IT-143, encapsulated doxorubicin for anaplastic thyroid cancer, with a target IND submission in Q4 2010; IT-145for pancreatic cancer, currently in pre-clinical development; and IT-121 a gene therapy based on oncology product, also in pre-clinical development.
Kevin Sill PhD received his BS in chemistry from the Univ. of Illinois (Champaign, IL) in 2001, his Master of Science in polymer science and engineering from Univ. of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass.) in 2002, and his Doctor of Philosophy in polymer science, and engineering from UMass in 2006. He began work at Interzyne in June 2004, when the company was incorporated, as the Vice President of Product Development, and in June of 2008 he became Intezyne’s Chief Science Officer.