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MIT researchers have developed a device the size of a grain of rice that can be implanted into a patient, and carry small doses of up to 30 different drugs that can be delivered in tandem. When implanted in a tumor, MIT News reports, the drugs will diffuse outward and researchers can pinpoint which agents were effective in killing cancer cells.
The research was published in the April 22 online edition of Science Translational Medicine. Notably, Robert Tepper, a partner at Third Rock Ventures, is a coauthor of the study, along with John Santini, president and CEO of ApoGen Biotechnologies.
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“This is a stunning advance in the approach to treating complex cancers,” Henry Brem, a professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was not involved in the research, told MIT News. “This work is transformative in that it now opens the doors to truly personalized medicine with the right drug or drug combination being utilized for each tumor.”
MIT News writes:
The device, made from a stiff, crystalline polymer, can be implanted in a patient’s tumor using a biopsy needle. After implantation, drugs seep 200 to 300 microns into the tumor, but do not overlap with each other. Any type of drug can go into the reservoir, and the researchers can formulate the drugs so that the doses that reach the cancer cells are similar to what they would receive if the drug were given by typical delivery methods such as intravenous injection.
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The research was published in the April 22 online edition of Science Translational Medicine. Notably, one of the study’s authors is Robert Tepper, a Third Rock Ventures partner.
By testing small amounts of powerful drugs in a patient’s tumor, doctors can begin to cut out some of the guesswork in choosing cancer treatments, Oliver Jonas, one of the study’s authors and an MIT postdoc in cancer research, told MIT News.
“You can use it to test a patient for a range of available drugs, and pick the one that works best,” Jonas said.
Researchers could test dosing or drug combinations with the device. It could also help test out new drugs in small doses, gauging on a micro-level how effective the it is in treating a tumor. Researchers are now working to make the device simpler to read while it’s still implanted in the patient, so they can more quickly analyze the drugs’ efficacy.
“The approach that we thought would be good to try is to essentially put the lab into the patient,” Jonas told MIT News. “It’s safe and you can do all of your sensitivity testing in the native microenvironment.”
