How bubbles can help us treat cancer
Oxford scientist Eleanor Stride has engineered a new way to deliver cancer drugs with precision
By JOÃO MEDEIROS
Monday 26 June 2017
Injecting bubbles in the bloodstream is usually the cause of a medical emergency, but that's precisely what Eleanor Stride intends to do to help us fight cancer. The biomedical engineer from the University of Oxford has developed a method of delivering cancer drugs by encapsulating them inside microbubbles. This allows for a precise delivery of the drug to a target tumour, improving the efficacy of the treatment.
“There is a tremendous need to improve the way we currently deliver drugs both to improve treatment efficacy and reduce the risk of side effects,” Stride tells WIRED. An example is chemotherapy, during which a cancer drug is diffused through the bloodstream, exposing every cell of the patient’s body to a very toxic agent. This causes the well-known side effects associated with the treatment, such as hair loss and nausea.
“In conventional chemotherapy, even using nanoparticles, less than 1 per cent of the total injected dose makes it into the tumour,” Stride says. “And all of that material is deposited close to the blood vessels at the tumour periphery.” Stride’s research has shown that microbubbles help push cancer drugs four times deeper into a tumour and increase the uptake of the drug. "By using microbubbles and ultrasound we can control when and where a drug gets released, and crucially also distribute it throughout a tumour," she says.
Stride’s microbubbles range between 1 and 2 micrometres in diameter and coated with biologically compatible materials — such as lipids — that prevent them from coalescing and potentially causing haemorrhages.
More:
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/cancer-bubble
