Drug tracked in tissue

17 October 2011 When a new drug is developed, the manufacturer must be able to show that it reaches its intended goal in the body’s tissue, and only that goal. Such studies could be made easier with a new method now established at Lund University in Sweden. The method is a special type of mass spectrometry which can be used on drugs 'off the shelf', i.e. without any radioactive labelling which may change the behaviour of the drug. With this method, researchers György Marko-Varga and Thomas Fehniger have managed to create a molecular image of the drug in the tissue. The tissue examined comes from biopsies from the lungs of patients with lung cancer and chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD), who have inhaled a drug to dilate the airways. The examination showed the precise spatial distribution of the drug within the tissue. The results are based on an analysis of 3 000 measurement points of 0.01 mm2 in each biopsy sample.