Sonodynamic therapy (SDT) and gene therapy

Medical Corporation “Saisei Mirai”, Osaka, Japan

One in Four Deaths in Japan Caused by Cancer.

Cancer is the most common cause of death for Japanese people who are 40 and over, while suicide is the leading cause among young people.

In 2020, 378,356 people died of cancer in Japan, according to a Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare report. This accounts for 27.6% of all deaths that year and equates to one in four people dying of cancer. The death rate for cancer—the number of deaths per 100,000 people—has been rising steadily and in 2020 reached 307.0. For men, the type of cancer with the highest death rate at 88.8 was lung cancer (53,244 deaths), followed by stomach cancer (27,769), and colorectal cancer (27,715). For women, the most common type with a death rate of 38.0 was colorectal cancer (24,069) and then lung cancer (22,337).

Cancer is also a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths. The most common cancers are breast, lung, colon and rectum and prostate cancers.

Saisei has been collaborating with 6 universities in Japan and actually, 4 out of 6 universities are not medical -universities. This is because we need the departments of Technology, Science, Veterinary Medicine and Pharmacy in order to develop new cancer treatments.

The key concept I’d like to discuss is the destruction of local cancer tissue in combination with natural immunotherapy. It is important that we destroy local cancer tissue with minimal side effects and kill cancer cells selectively.

Our goal is to help fight cancer cells with non-toxic medical treatments, with little to no side effects shown for most of our cancer patients.

This time, I’d like to introduce two of our treatments which are Sonodynamic therapy and Liposomal P 53 and PTEN gene therapy.

Sonodynamic therapy (SDT) is a new cancer modality which has huge potential in treating cancer. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has a limited success due to limited penetration depth (usually 2-5 mm).

Issue 29. November 2023 | Cardiometry | 15

Clinically, PDT has a very low success rate for liver and bone tumours and no success in the treatment of brain tumours.

SDT has been considered as a local treatment to destroy local cancer tissue, but SDT can be taken in a hot bath tub as a whole-body treatment. It can target primary tumours, both known and unknown, metastatic tumours, both known and unknown, circulating tumour cells (CTCs) in the blood and disseminated tumour cells (DTCs) in the bone marrow.

Acquired gene mutations are the most common cause of cancer. They occur from damage to genes during a person’s life and they’re not passed from parent to child.

Cancer gene therapy is a type of treatments which uses normal P53 and PTEN genes to destroy cancer cells at Saisei.

New liposomal P53 and P TEN gene therapy were developed by Saisei, collaborating with 2 big laboratories in Japan. We don’t use inactivated viruses as a vector instead we use liposomes to reduce side effects of the gene therapy and to use much higher doses of normal genes. So, gene therapy attempts to introduce genetic materials (DNA or RNA) into living cancer cells to cause apoptosis.