To treat cancer in organs like the liver, doctors are able to deliver drugs via catheter directly to the tumor, but leftover drug can escape and affect healthy organs elsewhere in the body. A drug sponge developed by UC Berkeley chemical engineers could sop up the residual drug, lessening side effects.
With the help of sponges inserted in the bloodstream to absorb excess drugs, doctors are hoping to prevent the dangerous side effects of toxic chemotherapy agents or even deliver higher doses to knock back tumors, like liver cancer, that don't respond to more benign treatments. The "drug sponge" is an absorbent polymer coating a cylinder that is 3D printed to fit precisely in a vein that carries the blood flowing out of the target organ - the liver in liver cancer, for example. There, it would sop up any drug not absorbed by the tumor, preventing it from reaching and potentially poisoning other organs. In early tests in pigs, the polymer-coated drug absorber took up, on average, 64 percent of a liver cancer drug - the chemotherapy agent doxorubicin - injected upstream. "Surgeons snake a wire into the bloodstream and place the sponge like a stent, and just leave it in for the amount of time you give chemotherapy, perhaps a few hours," said Nitash Balsara, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Because it is a temporary device, there is a lower bar in terms of approval by the FDA," said Steven Hetts, an interventional radiologist at UC San Francisco who first approached Balsara in search of a way to remove drugs from the bloodstream. "I think this type of chemofilter is one of the shortest pathways to patients." Most anticancer drugs are poisonous, so doctors walk a delicate line when administering chemotherapy.
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