Tiny 'Drug Factory' Implants Can Eradicate Tumors in Mice in Just Days

A new type of treatment that only takes a few days to become effective has been used to stop advanced-stage cancer in mice.

It will take some time to get this approach tested and working in humans, but the signs are promising that we have a new and powerful way to tackle mesothelioma.

The drug factories are made of tiny beads made of alginate and designed to produce continuous blasts ofIL-2. White blood cells are activated to fight tumors.

Bryan Burt is a thoracic surgeon and surgical oncologist from the college of medicine. It's very difficult to treat a very aggressive cancer of the lining of the lungs with surgery.

There is sometimes residual disease that is left behind. Local delivery of relatively high doses of immunotherapy to that pleural space is a very attractive way to treat this disease.

Mesothelioma tumors can be found in thepleural space, which is the layer of tissue that covers the lungs. The way that it's locally targeted is what makes the treatment successful.

The team combined the implants with a type of drug that trains the immune system to find and destroy cancer cells. The drug was used to target the PD-1Protein.

The tumors were wiped out in more than half of the animals tested.

The data shows that the delivery of the immunotherapy particles to the mice who have Mesothelioma has very effective treatment responses.

I have not seen the eradication of these tumors in mice with the same effectiveness that we have in this mouse model.

There's a good chance that the treatment could train the memory T cells in the body to fight another form of cancer, should it happen again.

Some serious side effects can come from IL-2 treatments. This area can be helped by the targeted nature of the therapy because it limits the parts of the body that are exposed to the drug.

The same drug bead factory technique used by some of the same researchers to try and tackle ovarian cancer is scheduled to start human clinical trials in the next few months. It's a treatment that has the potential to be more than one type of cancer.

"From the beginning, our goal was to develop a platform therapy that can be used for multiple different types of immune system disorders or different types of cancers," said bioengineers from Rice University.

The research has appeared in a journal.