New Anti-Cancer Drug Delivery Technology for Brain Tumors Is More Effective, Less Toxic [STUDY]

According to a new study, there is a new way to deliver anti-cancer drugs, enhancing the medicine's effectiveness while reducing its toxicities.

New Anti-Cancer Drug Delivery Technology

Mount Sinai Health System and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center researchers have developed a new technique to deliver drugs using nanoparticles. The new approach enables a more effective and targeted delivery of anti-cancer drugs to treat brain tumors in kids.

The technology allows the drugs to be delivered in specific brain locations while avoiding the normal brain regions. It improves the effectiveness and reduces toxicities of anti-cancer drugs, according to a new study, Phys.org reported.

Praveen Raju, MD, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Children's Brain and Spinal Tumor Center at Mount Sinai Kravis Children's Hospital, and senior author of the study, said that the enhanced drug delivery method enables them to deliver lower doses of the drug to specific sites while sparing bone toxicity that is observed in younger patients.

Medulloblastoma is reportedly the most common malignant brain tumor in kids. According to the National Cancer Institute, it is a primary central nervous system (CNS) tumor that begins in the brain or spinal cord.

Medulloblastoma accounts for about 20% of brain tumors in children. It is aggressive and challenging to treat. Worse, it is incurable in nearly 30% of patients.

Children who were cured of the illness suffered from severe long-term disabilities and health issues due to the adverse side effects of radiation and chemotherapy.

The site-directed drug delivery to the affected brain is hampered by a highly regulated blood-brain barrier that protects the brain from infections and other substances.

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New Drug Delivery Technology With Enhanced Efficacy

The researchers use the normal mechanism that the immune system uses to traffic white blood cells to sites of infection. However, instead of randomly sending immune cells throughout the body, they use a homing mechanism on activated blood vessels that immune cells use to go where needed.

They use the unique homing feature found in brain tumor blood vessels to target their drug-loaded nanoparticles to the designated location and avoid normal brain regions.

They tested the new drug delivery platform in a mouse model, and they were able to enhance its effectiveness, which is potentially useful for a subset of medulloblastoma patients.

According to Dr. Raju, Associate Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai., the targeted drug delivery is further enhanced with very-low-dose radiation, a standard therapy already used for children.

The new blood-barrier drug delivery technique can also improve the delivery of drugs for other pediatric brain tumors and localized diseases in the brain for both adults and kids, including focal epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, stroke, and possibly neurodegenerative disorders.

Daniel Heller, Ph.D., Head of the Cancer Nanomedicine Laboratory, Member of the Molecular Pharmacology Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and senior author of the study, said certain proteins appear on blood vessels at sites of inflammation help white blood cells exit the bloodstream. He likens it to police officers at a car accident site, who lets emergency personnel in to help. In their study, the emergency personnel comes as drug-loaded nanoparticles made of certain sugar molecules that can target the same proteins.

The researchers look forward to continuing their investigation about the method to harness the transport of drugs across the blood-brain barrier and other sites, as it will be a huge help to improve the effectiveness of several classes of approved and experimental therapeutics.

The study is published in Nature Materials.