Avelas Biosciences, Inc.

Biotechnology ResearchUnited States11-50 Employees

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.

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 would 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.

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