Does Nanomedicine Have a Delivery Problem?
Year: 2016
Type: other
Abstract: Have a Delivery Problem?C ancer drugs don't discriminate.They kill all cells, not just the cancerous ones.So drugmakers often look for ways to minimize how much of a chemotherapy drug ends up in healthy tissue while still delivering sustained high levels to tumors.Nanomedicine offers one possible way to thread this therapeutic needle.Loading nanoparticles with drug molecules can help the compounds stay in the blood longer and accumulate in tumors instead of in healthy tissue.But a recent paper in Nature Reviews Materials questions how effectively current nanoparticles target drugs to tumors.The authors reviewed the nanoparticle delivery literature from the past decade and estimated that the median delivery efficiency is lowonly 0.7% of an injected dose of nanoparticles ends up in a tumor.This low efficiency, the authors argue, is a hurdle for translating nanomedicines into the clinic.They propose a 30-year plan to study the delivery problem in detail to help improve efficiency."The paper has caused quite a storm," says Scott E. McNeil, director of the Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory (NCL) at the U.S. National Cancer Institute.McNeil and other experts working on nanoparticle cancer therapies say the paper's analysis neglects some critical factors in evaluating nanomedicines and, as a result, doesn't accurately depict the state of the field.These scientists don't see a delivery efficiency crisis thwarting the development of new cancer nanomedicines.Instead, they believe the field has already produced effective therapies and will continue to produce new ones in far fewer than 30 years.It was more than 20 years ago when the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved the first nanoparticle drug Doxil.Doxil encapsulates the cancer drug doxorubicin in a lipid sphere called a liposome.Since that decision in 1995, FDA has approved several other nanoparticle formulations.
Source: ACS Central Science
Author: Michael Torrice
Language: English
Subfield: Biomaterials
Field: Materials Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2462031667