Today’s chemotherapy delivery is poorly targeted, leading to lots of systemic side effects while often doing too little to attack the cancer itself. Researchers at State University of New York at Albany have now developed a way of encapsulating chemo agents within special shells that concentrate and open up around a special pre-positioned material next to a tumor.
The technique, dubbed “local drug activation,” relies on so-called “bioorthogonal chemistry” to gather near an implanted complementary biomaterial and have it trigger the shells to open up. In a proof of concept, the researchers targeted it toward soft tissue sarcoma tumors, achieving promising results.
The technique allows for higher concentrations of chemotherapy agents to attack tumors while sparing the blood that’s ferrying them and the rest of the body where the shells will not open up.
Study in journal ACS Central Science: In Vivo Bioorthogonal Chemistry Enables Local Hydrogel and Systemic Pro-Drug To Treat Soft Tissue Sarcoma…