A lighting shop will close this weekend – so that its owner can focus on his other company, which has come up with a treatment for brain tumours.
Dave Lawton has run The Lighting Showroom at The Trentham Estate’s shopping village for five years but will close it for good on Sunday, 22 October.
He has previously had other units in Rugeley and Cheadle and whilst the business will continue trading online, Dave will be concentrating on work with Extruded Pharmaceuticals, which he is one of the directors of.
The company has created ChemoSeed, a medical device that is implanted into a brain tumour and slowly-releases chemotherapy drugs directly to the cancer cells.
With brain tumours regarded as the biggest cancer killer of children and adults under 40 and encouraging test data from ChemoSeed so far, Dave, from Rugeley, believes his company’s work could help to save many lives.
He said: “There is currently only one approved treatment for brain tumours, which increases survival by only a few months and is brutal on patients and their families.
“What we have created is a device that is implanted during surgery for the removal of a brain tumour and targets the remaining cancer cells without the side effects associated with standard brain tumour treatment.
“The device sits against the tumour and helps to get a much higher proportion of the drug to where it needs to be.
“As a company, we are 12 to 18 months away from clinical trials, but the results of the phase one trials were unbelievable – completely irradicating the tumour in some cases.
“The amazing thing is that what we have got isn’t just limited to brain tumours – it could treat all sorts of cancers.”
Dave helped to start the company after a chance meeting with pharmaceuticals professor and ChemoSeed developer Dr Chris McConville.
Extruded Pharmaceuticals was formed in 2016 and has been privately financed so far.
ChemoSeed has been accepted onto the Tessa Jowell BRAIN MATRIX – a first-of-its-kind study into drugs to treat brain tumours – which will help to speed up its development.
And Dave and his team are also in discussions with an American clinic which is interested in their product.
The work is even more poignant for Dave because his wife Lindsay has a non-malignant brain tumour and his best friend’s wife died from one.
Dave added: “This is a drug that we should be using to help save people now.
“The company is already worth a huge amount of money and that will rocket when we get to human trials.
“I might not have the shop anymore, but it has given me the money to invest in this development and I’ll me putting all my energy into that from now on.”
“Run” surely?
Keep up the fantastic work Dave and team. It’s great to hear some good news with everything else that is happening in the world today.
This is really good to hear. Treatment and survival rates for this type of cancer are rather poor, so anything that improves on current treatments has to be applauded.