What are the key takeaways from this Beyond Biotech episode?

Key insights include: **Physics vs. Biology in Drug Development:** Physics-based therapeutics deliver reproducible, patient-agnostic effects because physical laws — unlike biological pathways — do not vary between individuals, time of day, or disease state. This means NBTXR3's primary mechanism of energy absorption operates identically in every patient, removing one layer of biological variability that undermines most conventional drug development programs.; **Radiotherapy's Core Limitation and the Hafnium Fix:** Radiation dose to a tumor is always capped by collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue — a constraint no equipment upgrade can eliminate. NBTXR3 hafnium oxide nanoparticles, injected once before the first radiation session, absorb ionizing energy locally and release damage within a one-to-two cell radius, raising tumor kill without touching surrounding tissue.; **Abscopal Immune Effect as a Secondary Mechanism:** Beyond local tumor destruction, NBTXR3 triggers immune recognition of previously hidden tumor antigens. In head-and-neck and melanoma patients resistant to multiple prior therapies including immunotherapy, irradiating a single injected lesion produced measurable responses in distant, untreated metastases — suggesting a systemic immune priming effect layered on top of the physical mechanism.

What did Beyond Biology discuss on Beyond Biotech?

Nanobiotix founder Laurent Levy explains how hafnium oxide nanoparticles injected directly into tumors amplify radiotherapy efficacy without increasing damage to surrounding tissue, with a phase three head-and-neck trial reading out in early 2026, plus a new Nano Primer platform designed to improve delivery of genetic medicines across oncology and CNS disorders. Key topics include: **Physics vs. Biology in Drug Development:** Physics-based therapeutics deliver reproducible, patient-agnostic effects because physical laws — unlike biological pathways — do not vary between individuals, time of day, or disease state. This means NBTXR3's primary mechanism of energy absorption operates identically in every patient, removing one layer of biological variability that undermines most conventional drug development programs.; **Radiotherapy's Core Limitation and the Hafnium Fix:** Radiation dose to a tumor is always capped by collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue — a constraint no equipment upgrade can eliminate. NBTXR3 hafnium oxide nanoparticles, injected once before the first radiation session, absorb ionizing energy locally and release damage within a one-to-two cell radius, raising tumor kill without touching surrounding tissue..

How long is this episode of Beyond Biotech?

This episode is 31 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Beyond Biotech

Beyond biology: Nanobiotix's physics-first approach to cancer

August 21, 2026

31 min episode · 2 min read

Beyond Biology

Episode

31 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Productivity, Health & Wellness, Startups

AI-Generated Summary

Published Aug 21, 2026

Key Takeaways

✓Physics vs. Biology in Drug Development: Physics-based therapeutics deliver reproducible, patient-agnostic effects because physical laws — unlike biological pathways — do not vary between individuals, time of day, or disease state. This means NBTXR3's primary mechanism of energy absorption operates identically in every patient, removing one layer of biological variability that undermines most conventional drug development programs.
✓Radiotherapy's Core Limitation and the Hafnium Fix: Radiation dose to a tumor is always capped by collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue — a constraint no equipment upgrade can eliminate. NBTXR3 hafnium oxide nanoparticles, injected once before the first radiation session, absorb ionizing energy locally and release damage within a one-to-two cell radius, raising tumor kill without touching surrounding tissue.
✓Abscopal Immune Effect as a Secondary Mechanism: Beyond local tumor destruction, NBTXR3 triggers immune recognition of previously hidden tumor antigens. In head-and-neck and melanoma patients resistant to multiple prior therapies including immunotherapy, irradiating a single injected lesion produced measurable responses in distant, untreated metastases — suggesting a systemic immune priming effect layered on top of the physical mechanism.
✓Nano Primer Platform Addresses a Cross-Industry Delivery Problem: IV-injected genetic medicines — including LNPs, oncolytic viruses, in-vivo CAR-T, and RNA therapies — lose up to 999,999 of every 1,000,000 particles to liver clearance before reaching target tissue. Nanobiotix's Nano Primer nanoparticle is injected first to saturate liver uptake capacity, allowing the subsequent therapeutic agent to circulate longer and reach targets at higher concentrations with reduced liver toxicity.
✓Clinical and Commercial Milestones Converging in 2025–2026: Three near-term readouts arrive in sequence: completion of pancreatic, melanoma, and esophageal cancer phase one/two trials; randomized phase two lung cancer data; and the J&J-run phase three head-and-neck registration trial result in the first half of 2026. The €85 million oversubscribed raise provides runway through 2029 independent of any J&J milestone payments, reducing financing pressure during this critical window.

What It Covers

Nanobiotix founder Laurent Levy explains how hafnium oxide nanoparticles injected directly into tumors amplify radiotherapy efficacy without increasing damage to surrounding tissue, with a phase three head-and-neck trial reading out in early 2026, plus a new Nano Primer platform designed to improve delivery of genetic medicines across oncology and CNS disorders.

Key Questions Answered

•Physics vs. Biology in Drug Development: Physics-based therapeutics deliver reproducible, patient-agnostic effects because physical laws — unlike biological pathways — do not vary between individuals, time of day, or disease state. This means NBTXR3's primary mechanism of energy absorption operates identically in every patient, removing one layer of biological variability that undermines most conventional drug development programs.
•Radiotherapy's Core Limitation and the Hafnium Fix: Radiation dose to a tumor is always capped by collateral damage to surrounding healthy tissue — a constraint no equipment upgrade can eliminate. NBTXR3 hafnium oxide nanoparticles, injected once before the first radiation session, absorb ionizing energy locally and release damage within a one-to-two cell radius, raising tumor kill without touching surrounding tissue.
•Abscopal Immune Effect as a Secondary Mechanism: Beyond local tumor destruction, NBTXR3 triggers immune recognition of previously hidden tumor antigens. In head-and-neck and melanoma patients resistant to multiple prior therapies including immunotherapy, irradiating a single injected lesion produced measurable responses in distant, untreated metastases — suggesting a systemic immune priming effect layered on top of the physical mechanism.
•Nano Primer Platform Addresses a Cross-Industry Delivery Problem: IV-injected genetic medicines — including LNPs, oncolytic viruses, in-vivo CAR-T, and RNA therapies — lose up to 999,999 of every 1,000,000 particles to liver clearance before reaching target tissue. Nanobiotix's Nano Primer nanoparticle is injected first to saturate liver uptake capacity, allowing the subsequent therapeutic agent to circulate longer and reach targets at higher concentrations with reduced liver toxicity.
•Clinical and Commercial Milestones Converging in 2025–2026: Three near-term readouts arrive in sequence: completion of pancreatic, melanoma, and esophageal cancer phase one/two trials; randomized phase two lung cancer data; and the J&J-run phase three head-and-neck registration trial result in the first half of 2026. The €85 million oversubscribed raise provides runway through 2029 independent of any J&J milestone payments, reducing financing pressure during this critical window.

Notable Moment

Levy describes a striking delivery failure endemic to genetic medicine: of one million therapeutic objects injected intravenously, sometimes only one reaches the intended target. Rather than modifying each therapeutic agent to evade the liver, Nanobiotix sends a separate nanoparticle ahead to occupy liver clearance capacity first.

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Episode Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from La BioTech. I'm Dylan Kysain, and this is episode 211 for the podcast. What if the key to beating cancer wasn't a new drug, but a new way of thinking about matter itself? That's the question Laurent Levy asked when he cofounded Nanobiotics over twenty years ago, and it's a question that is now producing some genuinely compelling answers in the clinic. Nanobiotics is a Paris based biotech pioneering what they call physics based nanomedicine. Their lead asset is a radio enhancer made of hafnium oxide nanoparticles designed to be injected directly into a tumor and amplify the destructive power of radiotherapy from within without ever increasing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. It is currently in phase three trials in head and neck cancer. But that's only half the story. The company's nano primer platform is now emerging as a potential new engine for growth with the promise of making an entirely new class of genetic medicines work better. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Laurent Levy right after this word from our friends at Inside Biotech. Hi, everyone. My name is Karishma Chughani, and I'm the cohost of Inside Biotech, the official podcast of Biotech Connection Los Angeles or BCLA. For those who may not know, BCLA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring, educating, and connecting emerging scientists, students, and entrepreneurs to help grow and diversify the biotech ecosystem in Los Angeles. On Inside Biotech, we invite you to get a behind the scenes look at one of the fastest growing biotech hubs in the country. Each month, we sit down with scientists, founders, investors, and industry leaders to talk about the cutting edge science inside their companies and the personal journeys that brought them there. From breakthrough therapeutics and AI and healthcare to career transitions beyond academia, we explore how science, business, and storytelling intersect to shape the future of biotech and SoCal. If you're a student exploring careers in STEM, a young professional navigating the industry, or simply curious about the people driving innovation, this podcast is for you. Search Inside Biotech wherever you get your podcast and give us a listen. We'd love to have you join us. Lauren, welcome to Beyond Biotech. Hello. Lauren, let's get started. Tell me a little bit about who you are and how you came to find this found this company, Nanobiotics. Well, maybe we can start with my my training. I've been trained as a physicist mainly, did some biology too, but my main stream learning was physics. And, I did my PhD in nanophysics, trying to understand what's happening with the laws of physics when you start reducing the size of the material. When you come to nanometers, laws of physics may be tweaked, may change. And I was there at the basis of my thesis. And, later on, I did a post doc, and in between, I was wondering what I should do with my …

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