Technion. Israel: While chemotherapy is
often a life-saving treatment for cancerous tumors, choosing the right
chemo for each patient remains an unmet clinical challenge. Furthermore,
current chemotherapies cause harsh side effects and damage healthy
organs alongside the tumors. “We want physicians to
have better tools for predicting which drugs would be best for each
patient, and get them to the target site more efficiently,” says Prof.
of Chemical Engineering Avi Schroeder, Head of the Technion Laboratory for Targeted Drug Delivery and Personalized Medicine Technologies.
Drug delivery systems in use
today surprisingly dispatch only 10% or less of a drug dose to the
tumor, with the remaining 90% distributed elsewhere in the body. “It’s
better than untargeted systems, but it’s far from ideal,” says Prof.
Schroeder.
Schroeder and his team are
developing nanosized “factories” that manufacture protein-based cancer
drugs inside the body upon reaching the tumor site. Mimicking the
protein-manufacturing strategy found in nature, the factories contain
ribosomes, amino acids and enzymes—the building blocks needed to
synthesize the desired protein-based drug.
At 150 nanometers or
smaller—1/1,000 the diameter of a strand of hair, these factories are
injected into the patient and circulate in the blood until finding the
tumor. Since many tumors have leaky blood vessels with pores that are
several hundred nanometers wide, these factories are small enough to
penetrate.
Other researchers have developed
systems that release drugs inside the tumor, but Prof. Schroeder and his
team are the first to manufacture drugs inside the tumor. “This is the
first proof of concept that you can actually synthesize new compounds
from inert starting materials inside the body,” says Schroeder.
His system promises to allow
physicians to tailor drugs specifically for each patient, and will allow
the patient to receive a more concentrated dose of the drug only where
it is necessary, thus escaping the harsh side effects.
After earning his PhD at Ben
Gurion University and postdoctoral studies at MIT with Prof. Robert
Langer, Schroeder returned to Israel. Courted by several universities,
he received a Horev Fellowship through the Henry and Marilyn Taub
Foundation Leaders In Science and Technology Faculty Recruitment
Program, and accepted a position at the Technion in 2012.
Prof. Schroeder is widely
published and has received more than 20 awards including TevaTech
Graduate Student Award in Chemistry and Biology, Intel PhD-Student Award
for Research in Nanotechnology, the Wolf Foundation PhD-Student Award,
the prestigious Polymer Advanced Technologies 2013 Young Scientific
Talents Award, and the Allon Fellowship.