A group of researchers at the University of Mississippi has created tiny capsules loaded with an anticancer drug and incorporated them into a small implant produced using 3D printing. The idea is to place this implant next to the tumor so that the drug acts locally rather than spreading throughout the body. So far, it has been tested on breast cancer cell cultures in the laboratory.
The study was published in the journal Pharmaceutical Research and focuses on two innovations: a 3D printing technique called FRESH and a type of nano-drug delivery known as spanlastics. Each of these capsules measures between 200 and 300 nanometers. To put that into perspective, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick.
Elom Doe (left), a doctoral student in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Jaidev Chakka (right), a principal investigator at the College of Pharmacy. (Photo credit: Hunt Mercier/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services).
Chemotherapy is administered orally or intravenously and travels through the bloodstream to the tumor. Along the way, it also attacks other rapidly dividing cells—namely, those in the scalp, the intestinal lining, and the skin. This explains the hair loss, nausea, vomiting, and anemia that often accompany treatment. “Delivering chemotherapeutics is always a nasty business because of the severe side effects that the patients experience,” says Jaidev Chakka, a principal scientist at the School of Pharmacy and one of the study’s authors. “The goal of this publication is: ‘How we can minimize those side effects?'”
Their approach is to deliver the drug directly to the tumor. If the implant is placed next to the tumor, the drug concentrates there instead of spreading throughout the body. Because of their size, the capsules can penetrate the cell membrane and release their contents inside the cancer cell, which is where the chemotherapy drugs need to act. “If the drug is not able to penetrate the cell membrane or be taken up by the cell, the effect of the drug is none,” Chakka explains.
The team, led by Mo Maniruzzaman, a professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Drug Delivery at the university, believes the technique would be particularly useful for cancers detected early, before metastasis has occurred. A local implant is of little help once the disease has already spread.
So far, the drug has only been tested in vitro—that is, in isolated cells. “We would have to test it in in-vivo models before we can think of delivering it to patients, and that’s not a job you can do in a day,” warns Elom Doe, a third-year doctoral student in pharmaceutical sciences and co-author of the study. Find the official press release here.
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*All Photo Credits: The University of Mississippi