Implant delivers chemo cocktail directly to cancer tumours

Implantable device delivers treatment for pancreatic cancer directly to tumours, bypassing bloodstream and limiting widespread side effects, according to The University of North Carolina (UNC)

A team of researchers from UNC, including Jen Jen Yeh and Joseph DeSimone, has shown that the device can deliver a particularly toxic dose of drugs directly to pancreatic tumours to stunt their growth or in some cases shrink them.

UNC has also said that this approach would also spare the patient toxic side effects.

Jen Jen Yeh, said: "We use the device to hit the primary tumour hard. It’s an exciting approach because there is so little systemic toxicity that it leaves room to administer additional drugs against cancer cells that may have spread in the rest of the body.”

The work, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights the cocktail FOLFIRINOX, a combination of four chemotherapy drugs that UNC said has been shown to shrink tumours or halt their growth in nearly a third of pancreatic cancer patients.

The new device currently tested in mice, delivers the drugs directly to the tumour, providing an alternative to sending this toxic cocktail through the bloodstream and UNC said this limits harsh effects throughout the rest of the body.

Joseph DeSimone, said: “We are striving to get our device into clinical trials within the next several years. The prospect of halting tumour growth with our device and potentially shrinking tumours could help more patients qualify for surgery.”

The findings are the latest for the researchers in the testing of the implantable device, which uses electric fields to drive the chemotherapy drugs directly into tumours.

In a study published last year in Science Translational Medicine, the team showed, for the first time in animal models, that the device could be implanted on top of pancreatic tumours to increase the amount of the cancer drug gemcitabine reaching them.

The tumours stopped growing and shrunk which, UNC said, provided more favourable conditions to remove the tumour and cure the disease.

The latest study also increased the amount of drug reaching the tumours, lowered drug concentration in the blood and significantly impacted tumour growth compared to intravenous delivery of the same drugs. But this time, the device was used with a more potent four-drug combination making the treatment more effective while limiting side effects, according to UNC.

The accumulation of drugs in the tumour using the device was at least three times greater than when using IV administration.

James Byrne, the paper’s first author and a current medical student at the UNC School of Medicine, said: “The beauty of this device is that all of the drug delivery is focused locally, with low delivery to the rest of the body.

“If this works in humans, we hope the device can be used as a plug-and-play approach to delivering the latest, most promising drug regimens for patients who have a dire need for new and better treatments.”