New Approach to Fight Solid Tumors
Wednesday, April 5th, 2017
ONAMI gap fund company Cascade Prodrug and researchers at OSU develop new cancer-drug delivery system
ONAMI gap fund company Cascade Prodrug and researchers at Oregon State University have developed a new cancer-drug delivery system capable of exploiting the oxygen-poor areas of solid tumors that make the growths resistant to standard chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
Carcinomas that affect the breast, lung, prostate and colon are among the solid-tumor cancers, as are malignancies in the lymphatic system, known as lymphomas, and the much less common sarcomas that arise in connective tissue.
These solid masses often contain hypoxic regions, where the concentration of oxygen in the tissue is low. Hypoxic cancer cells grow slowly, and that makes them less susceptible to the drugs prescribed to kill or damage them.
The current work finds a way to turn the tables on those cells using a “prodrug” loaded into nanostructured platforms.
A prodrug is a pharmacologically inactive compound that the body metabolizes into an active drug, in this case the cancer drug vinblastine.
Provided with the prodrug vinblastine-N-oxide by research partners at Cascade Prodrug Inc. of Eugene, Ore., OSU scientists developed two different lipid-based platform formulations known as liposomes to carry the prodrug to the tumor’s hypoxic regions. There, the lack of oxygen triggers its metabolic conversion to vinblastine.
In both formulations – one with polyethylene glycol on its surface, one without – the prodrug proved both safe and much more effective against non-small cell lung cancer than when it was delivered without a liposome.
ONAMI supported this research, whose findings were recently published in the Journal of Controlled Release.
Read the complete story in this April 4, 2017, OSU press release.
