Radical drug delivery procedure could save thousands of lives
Though healthcare professionals can often diagnose medical conditions quickly, the challenge often comes in treating conditions where drugs cannot easily be administered.
One such problem is posed when treating cystic fibrosis sufferers, as the sticky mucus created by sufferers' bodies often prevents drugs from getting through, but experts in the US believe they may have found a solution.
Work carried out at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, has led to the creation of a drug delivery system, which the team claims can work its way through sticky mucus.
The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and may lead to new forms of medicinal delivery being formulated to treat diseases of the eye, lung, gut or female reproductive tract, said lead researcher Professor Pamela Zeitlin.
She told health cover holders: "In our study, the nanoparticles were engineered to travel through cystic fibrosis mucus at a much greater velocity than ever before, thereby improving drug delivery. This work is critically important to moving forward with the next generation of small molecule and gene-based therapies."
Currently, there are 70,000 sufferers worldwide, with 1,000 new cases diagnosed each year, a statistic which the new discovery may have an impact on.
Professor Zeitlin, a resident at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and director of paediatric pulmonary medicine at the Johns Hopkins Children's Center, said the new drug delivery system could also cut mortality rates considerably.
She told those with health insurance coverage that a key development in the study was creating a cargo which could dissolve over time into harmless components.
Benjamin Tang, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, added that the method could eventually replace chemotherapy as a way of treating lung cancer.
"If drugs are encapsulated in these nanoparticles and inhaled directly into the lungs of lung cancer patients, drugs may reach lung tumours more effectively and improved outcomes may be achieved, especially for patients diagnosed with early stage non–small cell lung cancer."
The experts, along with fellow researcher Professor Jie Fu, now intend to test the treatment on a wider variety of conditions to establish its effectiveness.
Posted by Stephen Tate
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