New drug delivery device 'could transform cancer treatment'

The totaling device uses a method called "iontophoresis" where an electrical arena drives chemotherapy drugs directly into the tumor, preventing their buildup, and in some cases, even shrinking them, says the team from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill.

The electrical ground is conveyed via electrodes either implanted internally - for example to treat a pancreatic tumor - or applied externally to the skin - for example to treat an underlying breast tumor.

The UNC researchers describe the iontophoretic device and how they tested it on the subject of human pancreatic tumors grafted into mice and dogs, in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Pancreatic cancer is relatively scarce, however it is the fourth leading cause of cancer-associated death in the US where estimates want in 2014 over 46,000 people were diagnosed considering the disease and re 40,000 died of it.
Limits of current methods

The main excuse three house of people who produce pancreatic cancer make a play in-argument of not survive on peak of 12 months after diagnosis - a statistic that has not tainted in 40 years - is because by the times the cancer is found, it is at an bargain once looking stage and hard to treat.

Unfortunately, even though surgery is the best different for curing pancreatic cancer, not many patients can have it because by the period their tumor is detected it has entwined itself following major organs and blood vessels.

Current ways of delivering chemotherapy are furthermore limited because the pancreatic cancer cells are competently-protected by a fortress of tissue that impedes the perfusion of drugs that could instead shrink the tumor or buttonhole it growing.

Also, pancreatic cancer tumors put it on not have a suitable blood supply, hence limiting the effectiveness of drug delivery via the bloodstream. Increasing the dose is not an choice because it increases toxicity to the burning of the body.
The auxiliary device delivered drugs into tumors more effectively than IV

In their laboratory analysis, the team showed that the iontophoretic device delivered chemotherapy drugs into the tumors much more effectively than the pleasant intravenous (IV) method, and with achieved highly developed concentrations of the drugs in the tumor without increasing toxicity to the flaming of the body.

For example, noting the upshot of one test, the authors write:

"Device delivery of gemcitabine in dogs resulted in more than 7-fold difference in local drug concentrations and 25-fold lower systemic drug levels than the IV treatment."

Co-author Jen Jen Yeh, member professor of surgery and pharmacology in the School of Medicine at UNC, says:

    "Once this goes to clinical trials, it could shift the paradigm for pancreatic cancer treatments - or any new hermetic tumors where innocent IV chemotherapy drugs are well along to profit to."

Funds for the psychoanalysis came from the University Cancer Research Fund and the National Institutes of Health.

In December 2014, Medical News Today scholarly of other build taking place that could be a game-changer for other group of patients in the feel of hard cancers. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed a minimally invasive, robot-assisted procedure for treating head and neck tumors that were yet to be inoperable.