Liquid
Crystal Polymer Capsules Deliver Targeted Chemo to Brain
Intracranial neoplasms are **toriously difficult to kill. Part of the problem lies in delivering
Chemo ***** to the brain, currently done by injecting the compounds into the blood stream with the hope that e**ugh will cross and reach their targets before causing too much damage to the rest of the body. While
Chemo can be more effective in the rest of the body, the blood-brain barrier prevents the full force of chemotherapy from attacking intracranial tumors.
**w researchers from MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Johns Hopkins University have reported in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences*that they developed tiny implantable
Capsules that can release
Chemo agents directly into the
Brain more safely and with greater therapeutic effect. The experiments, performed on laboratory mice, involved filling tiny
Liquid Crystal Polymer Capsules with about 1.5 milliliters of either temozolomide or doxorubicin, commonly used chemotherapy *****. These were implanted into mice with metastases in the brain. Comparing to identical mice that received injections of the *****, the researchers found that*temozolomide secreted by the
Capsules was significantly more effective than injections, while doxorubicin actually proved to be less so. The team was able to show that while temozolomide was able to move a good distance away from the implants, doxorubicin’s molecules didn’t travel very far before being ******* by the body as trash.
Some of the next steps to bring this tech**logy to clinical practice will involve identifying which
Chemo compounds would be most effective for such a delivery system, and moving*forward to*clinical trials in human patients.
Study in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:*
Intracranial microcapsule chemotherapy delivery for the localized treatment of rodent metastatic breast ade**carci**ma in the brain…
MIT:*
Better chemotherapy through targeted delivery…
