Cell-Based Drug Delivery Platform Yields Potential Cancer Treatment

One of the great challenges in cancer therapeutics is finding how to specifically deliver high doses of chemotherapeutics to a tumor.

Prostate cancer affects over 2.5 million Americans. A collaborative Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) and Johns Hopkins University (JHU) co-led team has found proof-of-concept evidence for a potential cancer treatment that leverages microparticles and mesenchymal stem cells.

The researchers devised an approach to stably internalize chemotherapy loaded microparticles into cells. With the help of a powerful prodrug - developed by collaborators at JHU - that is specifically activated by prostate cells, the researchers effectively targeted and killed prostate cancer tumor cells in proof of concept experiments.

Older Women Receive Targeted Breast Cancer Treatment at Low Rates
Trastuzumab increases overall survival for HER2-postive breast cancers by 37 percent when combined with postoperative chemotherapy.

TOP INSIGHT

Prostate cancer affects over 2.5 million Americans, but there is an unmet need for targeted treatment with minimal systemic toxicity.

The researchers' results were recently published in Biomaterials. "In cancer therapeutics, one of the great challenges is finding how to specifically deliver high doses of chemotherapeutics to a tumor, but minimize the systemic toxicity," said Jeffrey Karp, PhD, the BWH senior author. Prostate cancer affects over 2.5 million Americans, but there is an unmet need for targeted treatment with minimal systemic toxicity, especially for metastatic disease.

Prostate cancer tumors are characterized by a mixed cell population, which makes targeting the different kinds of cells with one treatment very difficult. "Mesenchymal stem cells represent a potential vehicle that can be engineered to seek out tumors," said Oren Levy, PhD, co-lead author. "Loading those cells with a potent chemotherapeutic drug is a promising cell-based Trojan horse approach to deliver drugs to sites of cancer."

This cell-based drug delivery platform, supported in part by the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Movember Foundation, successfully kills tumor cells via a strong "bystander effect." "The prodrug only becomes toxic in the presence of the tumor microenvironment, which adds another layer of specificity to this targeted delivery system," said John Isaacs, PhD, the JHU senior author.

Oncologists Share Expertise on Cancer Treatment at a 3-Day Conference in India
Doctors from across the globe shared expertise in cancer treatment, so as to lower the incidence of the disease in the Asian region.

In the future, researchers hope to harness this versatile particle-in-a-cell platform technology for use with different drugs to target an array of diseases, including cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

Source-Eurekalert

Prostate Cancer Treatments Suppress Immune Response And May Promote Relapse
Surgical ADTs work well with immunotherapy. However, some androgen receptor antagonists reduce the T-cell response against prostate cancer, leading to a relapse.

PET Imaging Technology to Improve Patient's Response to Cancer Treatment
Years of significant improvements in PET imaging technology have led to the detection of an enzyme in humans that plays a significant role in DNA formation.