Personalized cancer therapy: a search for options
Bioengineers have created an implant to select the optimal cancer drug
Asya Gorina, Vesti
Everyone knows that today there is no universal effective cancer drug. Therapy is selected individually for each patient, but sometimes doctors simply do not have time to try all the medications, the patient's condition worsens.
To solve this problem, bioengineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a small implant the size of a grain of rice, which will allow you to inject up to 30 different drugs in small doses and quickly pick up a really working one in each case.
The principle of operation of the new device is as follows. The implant is injected directly into the patient's tumor, and the device emits small doses of various medications. Doctors then measure how effectively each individual compound kills cancer cells.
"Our development will allow doctors to no longer guess which remedy will work best for each patient. The device can be used for simultaneous testing of a number of drugs," says lead author of the study Oliver Jonas from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose article was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine (Oliver Jonas et al., An implantable microdevice to perform high–throughput in vivo drug sensitivity testing in tumors).
Modern methods of drug testing involve removing the tumor from the patient, growing it in a laboratory Petri dish and introducing various compounds into it. The main drawback of this method, according to MIT experts, is that the tumor is removed from its natural environment, the impact of which can be very great.
"Our approach involves transferring the laboratory directly into the patient's body. This is a safe method to test drugs directly in the tumor's natural microenvironment," explains Jonas.
The device is made of a rigid crystalline polymer and can be implanted into the patient's tumor using a conventional biopsy needle. Then the drugs are injected 200-300 micrometers deep into the tumor, each in its own direction, which excludes the possibility of mixing them with each other.
A day after the implant is inserted, it is removed along with a small area of the tumor, on which various medications have already been tested. The researchers then proceed to analyze the effects of the drugs and study the presence of markers of cell death. Comparing the data will allow you to calculate the most effective tool from the tested ones.
To test the device, scientists injected it into mice that had previously been transplanted with tumors of the human prostate, breast, and melanoma. These three types of cancer are characterized by variable sensitivity to various drugs and therefore are ideal for the experiment.
The researchers then tested the device on triple negative breast cancer, a special type of cancer that lacks the most common markers of breast cancer – the estrogen receptor, progesterone receptor and HER2 membrane protein. This type of cancer is particularly dangerous because none of the drugs used against it can target a specific genetic marker.
Using their new device, the scientists found that triple negative tumors reacted differently to the five medications commonly used to treat them. Paclitaxel was the most effective, followed by doxorubicin, cisplatin, gemcitabine and lapatinib. The same results were obtained with the delivery of these drugs by intravenous injection, which proves the accuracy of the new technique.
The authors of the new study note in a press release that the implant they developed can also be used to test various combinations of existing drugs in order to increase the effectiveness of treatment (How to identify drugs that work best for each patient). Thus, the device is also suitable for the development of new drugs for the treatment of oncological diseases, as well as for preclinical testing of newly obtained compounds.
We should add that earlier the Americans from Champions Oncology also offered to grow a tumor in mouse avatars, after which they tried out one or another type of chemotherapy on rodents. This approach is better than checking in Petri dishes, since cancer develops in an organism that is in many ways close to human. However, it is very expensive and also not as realistic as the one proposed by MIT specialists.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru28.04.2015