New research offers hope that cancer drug therapies packaged in 3D printed carriers could deliver medication directly to tumors while reducing many of the side effects that cancer patients endure.
The team demonstrated that 3D printed spanlastics — a tiny carrier filled with cancer-fighting drugs — could be implanted directly at the site of a tumor and kill those cells.
Traditional chemotherapy is often given orally or injected into the bloodstream, where the circulatory system disperses cancer-fighting therapy throughout the body.
Anticancer therapies target cells that reproduce quickly — such as cancer — but also affect other quick-spreading cells like hair, intestinal linings, and skin. This is one of the reasons that chemotherapy has so many side effects, such as hair loss, nausea, vomiting, and anemia.
Delivering the drug directly to the cancer cell could reduce those side effects. Each of the microscopic capsules was 200–300 nanometers in length. Because of their tiny size, the drug nanocarriers can pass through cell membranes, delivering a high dosage of cancer-fighting medication directly to affected cells.
Because this method focuses on a single area, it would be especially beneficial in early cancer diagnoses, before the disease has a chance to spread, or metastasize. While these findings are promising, this lab-based study is only the first step in using spanlastics in cancer treatment, they caution.
