Japanese biotech firm Rakuten Medical wants to bring its novel ‘lightsaber’ cancer cure to the U.S.
Source: Fortune ·
In the short-term, the firm is looking to enter markets close to home—including Taiwan, Macau, Singapore, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.
From the source
Minami Maeda, CEO of Rakuten Medical, hopes he can get doctors to stop using their scalpels and try something more science-fiction instead. “We’re essentially asking surgeons to put down their knives, and pick up this lightsaber,” he tells Fortune, referring to the company’s new technology that uses light as a way to treat cancer. Rakuten Medical, the biotech offshoot of Japanese tech conglomerate Rakuten, is putting about 95% of the company’s resources into cracking the U.S. market. The San Diego-headquartered firm is already using its signature photoimmunotherapy treatment to treat head and neck cancers in Japan; it’s now running Phase 3 clinical trials in the U.S. and gunning for a 2028 FDA submission. “The U.S. is the world’s biggest market, and it’s also where a lot of capital is deployed,” Maeda tells Fortune. “We want to be able to treat all solid tumors, rather than stop at just head and neck cancers—that means we need significant capital to be invested into R&D.” An…