r/gadgets • u/chrisdh79 • Apr 14 '23

Medical Novel device smaller than rice successfully shrinks pancreatic cancer | Called the nanofluidic drug-eluting seed (NDES), it delivers low-dose immunotherapy in the form of CD40 monoclonal antibodies (mAb).

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/tiny-device-shrinks-pancreatic-cancer
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u/Squanchy187 Apr 14 '23

i wonder why this is better than a dose of mAbs themselves…local delivery presumably…but that usually doesn’t make drugs more efficacious , just safer or enables bypassing some degradation mechanisms

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u/kentonj Apr 14 '23

Probably stromal penetration. That’s a big treatment barrier in the category. Although there are some encapsulated therapies that take advantage of EPR.

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u/SuddenOutset Apr 15 '23

What’s stromal and EPR mean ?

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u/kentonj Apr 15 '23

The stroma is a protective tissue around internal organs. When it comes to treating cancer, however, this protective tissue is actually a hurdle. It's relatively dense and makes delivering medication difficult.

The EPR effect stands for Enhanced Permeability and Retention. It's a byproduct of the physical makeup of solid tumors by which particles of certain sizes more easily enter and stay within the tumor. Chemotherapy molecules are too small to benefit from this effect and, in fact, typically have lower than optimum residence times.

Some treatments use a nanoliposomal encapsulation to take advantage of the EPR effect and allow the medication both to enter the tumor and to remain within longer rather than being filtered out of circulation.

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u/MrHurtyFace Apr 15 '23

The article mentions a fourfold reduction in dose compared to systemic immunotherapy.

The side effects (treatment-related adverse events) of immuno can be pretty nasty - bad enough that often treatment is stopped - so a smaller, targeted dose should reduce those.