targeted-chemo-brainWhen it comes to the presence of intracranial neoplasms, those do happen to carry a negative reputation by the simple fact that they are extremely notorious to “kill”. One of the major issues would be the problem of delivering chemo drugs to the brain. At the moment, one of the most common methods would be to inject such compounds into the blood stream, and fingers crossed that the injected compounds would arrive at the targeted area to do its job – while minimizing the amount of damage to the body. The blood-brain barrier is another obstacle that prevents maximum effectiveness for chemotherapy to “attack” intracranial tumors, but all of this could be relegated to a thing of the past soon. Researchers from MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Johns Hopkins University have come up with small, implantable capsules which are capable of releasing chemo agents straight into the brain.

This is said to be done in a more safe manner, not to mention with a greater therapeutic effect. So far, experiments have been performed on laboratory mice, and this saw the filling of tiny liquid crystal polymer capsules with approximately 1.5 milliliters of either temozolomide or doxorubicin, which happen to be common chemotherapy drugs. When implanted into mice with metastases in the brain, it was discovered to be extremely effective in what it does, and the next stage would be to usher such technology into clinical practice before clinical trials in human patients begin. [Press Release]

Filed in Medical..

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