While a variety of cancer medications are in existence and often work incredibly well, picking ones that are effective on the individual patients’ tumors is usually like pinning a tail on a donkey. Researchers at MIT have developed a device that may offer a way of testing cancer drugs within the body before administering the full dose of what will probably work.
The technology is essentially a tiny implantable container with compartments holding miniscule amounts of different cancer drugs. When injected into a tumor, the implant releases the drugs around itself so that nearby slices of the tumor are infused by different drugs. Being able to visualize how the various slices are affected by the drugs gives a good indication of which drugs will work on the cancer as a whole. The researchers tested the technique on mice who had grafts of three different human cancers implanted into them, showing that the system is pretty accurate at predicting what works. Additionally, the same methodology can be used for testing combination therapies by loading the implant’s compartments with different groups of drugs.
From the study abstract in Science Translational Medicine:
Currently, up to 16 individual drugs or combinations can be assessed independently, without systemic drug exposure, through minimally invasive biopsy of a small region of a single tumor. This assay takes into consideration physiologic effects that contribute to drug response by allowing drugs to interact with the living tumor in its native microenvironment. Because these effects are crucial to predicting drug response, we envision that these devices will help identify optimal drug therapy before systemic treatment is initiated and could improve drug response prediction beyond the biomarkers and in vitro and ex vivo studies used today. These devices may also be used in clinical drug development to safely gather efficacy data on new compounds before pharmacological optimization.
At top, the researchers can use this device to measure how far a given drug spreads over time. At bottom, they used the device to measure the spread of four different cancer drugs.
Study in Science Translational Medicine: An implantable microdevice to perform high-throughput in vivo drug sensitivity testing in tumors…
Source: MIT…