Unmet Need
Glioblastomas account for 45% of all brain cancers, and affect nearly 11,000 men, women and children every year. They are the most debilitating, complex, and treatment-resistant brain tumors. They can become widespread quickly and can grow in multiple areas at once making them difficult to remove completely using surgery or radiation therapy. Pharmaceutical therapies are also difficult to develop because the blood brain barrier prevents most drugs from entering the brain. One method to overcome the blood brain barrier is to use convection-enhanced diffusion (CED) to directly administer the therapeutics into the tumor, but recurrence of the tumor is still an issue and median patient life is still below 4 years at best. Combining CED with a novel drug delivery system has the potential of improving the administration of therapeutics using CED in brain tumors. There is a need for a vehicle that can facilitate long lasting, deeply penetrating, and widespread even distribution of therapeutics in the brain.
Technology Overview
Our invention is a generally recognized as safe (GRAS) nanoparticle with a non-adhesive coating administered using CED. The nanoparticle and method of administration facilitates larger diameter (up to 200 nm) nanoparticles to penetrate deeper into tissue and diffuse further throughout the brain. The advantages of our technology over others is the widespread distribution of the nanoparticles, the almost 100% tumor tissue penetration, and the larger size allowing for higher concentrations of the therapeutic.
Stage of Development
The distribution and penetration of the 60 – 200 nm nanoparticles demonstrated in brain tumor animal models.
Publication
Negron, Karina, et al. "A Highly Translatable Dual‐arm Local Delivery Strategy To Achieve Widespread Therapeutic Coverage in Healthy and Tumor‐bearing Brain Tissues." Small 19.11 (2023): 2207278. - https://doi.org/10.1002/smll.202207278
