UTSA study reveals a new device able to negate daily doctor visits for treatment administration
Orange County, CA - December 12th 2016 - Collaboration between assistant professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), Lyle Hood, and chair of the Department of Nanomedicine at Houston Methodist Research Institute, Alessandro Grattoni has yielded a device they believe could transform cancer treatment including a multitude of other diseases. The device is a method of timed drug delivery that is able to release precise doses daily, negating the need for daily trips to the doctor, pills, or injections.
Most drugs require a dosage that must be maintained at certain levels in order for the medication to take effect. Alternatively if such levels are surpassed, the patient may become ill. This requires patients to adhere to daily regimens requiring medication, administered at home or at a physician’s office. During treatment, complications develop upon missing doses of the panacea, potentially resulting in the development of resistance towards the medication. This new device, still unnamed, offers a solution.
"It's an implantable capsule, filled with medicinal fluid that uses about 5000 nanochannels to regulate the rate of release of the medicine," said Hood "This way, we have the proper amount of drugs in a person's system to be effective, but not so much that they'll harm that person."
Capable of lasting weeks, the device can be implemented for any treatments requiring localized delivery. Prototypes previously developed by Grattoni, were used to contest illness such as HIV, this new technology will be an option for cancer treatment.
The device has the potential to be used in the exploration of immunotherapy treatment in cancer patients. Its ability to spare patients from multifarious injections of cortisone to damaged joints, make the device a point of interest for future studies.
"The idea behind immunotherapy is to deliver a cocktail of [immunal] drugs to call attention to the cancer in a person's body, so the immune system will be inspired to get rid of the cancer itself," he said.
The device is still in the prototypal phase, but the most up-to-date version is implanted through a permanent epidermal injection. Hood is currently working in cooperation with Teja Guda, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UTSA, to further the potential of the device. The two hope to use 3-D printing technology to produce a new, fully biodegradable version to be taken orally.
The study was published in Journal of Biomedical Nanotechnology.
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UTSA study reveals a new device able to negate daily doctor visits for treatment administration Orange County, CA – December 12th 2016 – Collaboration between assistant professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), Lyle Hood, and chair of the Department of Nanomedicine at Houston Methodist Research Institute, Alessandro Grattoni has […]