University North Carolina. US: Device that drives drugs into solid tumors that are poorly vascularized
opens the possibility of life-saving surgeries in cancer patients. James
Byrne, PhD, a medical student and member of Joseph DeSimone’s lab, led
the research by constructing the device and examining its ability to
deliver chemotherapeutic drugs effectively to pancreatic cancer tumors,
as well as two types of breast cancer tumors.
Pancreatic cancer cells are notorious for being protected by a fortress
of tissue, making it difficult to deliver drugs to either shrink the
tumor or stop its growth. Now researchers at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill have developed a device that could change all
that: By using electric fields, the device can drive chemotherapy drugs
directly into tumor tissue, preventing their growth and in some cases,
shrinking them.
The work, to be published Feb. 4 in Science
Translational Medicine, opens the possibility of dramatically increasing
the number of people who are eligible for life-saving surgeries. It
represents a fundamentally new treatment approach for pancreatic cancer,
which has a 75 percent mortality rate within a year of diagnosis - a
statistic that has not changed in more than 40 years.
“Surgery
to remove a tumor currently provides the best chance to cure pancreatic
cancer,” said DeSimone who is Chancellor’s Eminent Professor of
Chemistry at UNC and William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of
Chemical Engineering at NC State University. “However, often a diagnosis
comes too late for a patient to be eligible for surgery due to the
tendency of the tumors to become intertwined with major organs and blood
vessels.”
“Once this goes to clinical trials, it could shift
the paradigm for pancreatic cancer treatments – or any other solid
tumors where standard IV chemotherapy drugs are hard to get to,” said
Jen Jen Yeh, associate professor of surgery and pharmacology in UNC’s
School of Medicine and a member of the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer
Center.
James Byrne, a member of DeSimone’s lab at UNC-Chapel
Hill, led the research by constructing the device and examining its
ability to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs effectively to pancreatic
cancer tumors, as well as two types of breast cancer tumors.
Depending
on the tumor type, the new device can be used either internally after a
minimally invasive surgery to implant the device’s electrodes directly
on a tumor (an approach relevant especially for pancreatic cancer and
other less accessible tumors) or externally to deliver drugs through the
skin (an approach relevant especially for treating inflammatory breast
cancers and other accessible tumors such as head and neck cancers).
Researchers
have also demonstrated the device’s ability to enable higher drug
concentrations in tumor tissue while avoiding increased systemic
toxicity. This is especially important in treating pancreatic and other
solid tumors, which are not well vascularized and are thus difficult to
reach using standard treatment methods that rely on the bloodstream for
delivering cancer-fighting drugs to tumors.
“Progress in the
treatment of pancreatic cancer has been persistent but incremental in
the past few decades, relying largely on advances in drug therapies. To
our knowledge, our study represents the first time iontophoresis has
been applied to target pancreatic cancer,” said Byrne, who is currently
completing his medical degree at UNC-Chapel Hill after earning his
doctorate in 2014 as a member of the DeSimone lab.
“We hope
our invention can be used in humans in the coming years and result in a
notable increase in life expectancy and quality among patients diagnosed
with pancreatic and other types of cancer,” added Byrne.
The
work was funded in part by the University Cancer Research Fund and the
National Institutes of Health’s Director’s Pioneer Award Program.
Collaboration among researchers at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy,
UNC School of Medicine, Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, Duke
University and the UNC College of Arts and Sciences made the work
possible.
Communications and Public Affairs contact: Thania Benios, (919) 962 – 8596, thania_benios@unc.edu