Conventional liposome performance and evaluation: lessons from the development of Vescan

In the early 1980s, Vestar Inc., a company founded on the basis of science developed by the California Institute of Technology and the City of Hope, brought into development an imaging agent based on liposome encapsulated (111)In(3+). This agent, named Vescan, together with the gamma ray perturbed angular correlation spectroscopy technique to examine liposome integrity, was envisioned as a broadly applicable in vivo tumor diagnostic agent. While not ultimately commercialized, the agent was used to successfully image a variety of tumors, and was evaluated in late-stage clinical trials. Lessons learned from the formulation and process development of this product, and the wealth of non-clinical and clinical results, revealed valuable information about the properties of stable, RES avoiding conventional liposomes. This technology ultimately would lead (at NeXstar Pharmaceuticals and, later, at Gilead Sciences) to the technology that created commercialized liposomal products such as AmBisome and DaunoXome as well as other development stage product candidates.