Lipid-Based Nanoparticle to Deliver Drugs for Deadly Brain Tumour

Glioblastoma multiforme a form of brain tumour with no curative options due to the inability to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier.

Micelles containing drugs that can easily pass through the blood-brain barrier could be targeted to deliver chemotherapeutic drugs more efficiently to tumour cells in the brain, a study has found. //

"I was very surprised by how efficiently and well it worked once we got the nanocarrier to those cells," said study author Ann-Marie Broome from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

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Glioblastomas are tumors that arise from astrocytes that make up the supportive tissue of the brain. Glioblastomas are usually highly malignant.

‘A phospholipid nanocarrier was engineered to deliver a concentrated dose of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide to the targeted brain tumor cells.’

The study, published in the journal Nanomedicine-Future Medicine, showed specific uptake and increased killing in glial cells, so much so that Broome initially questioned the results. She had her team keep repeating the experiments, using different cell lines, dosage amounts and treatment times.

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) a form of brain tumour is a devastating disease with no curative options due to several challenges, said Broome.

The tumour has a significant overall mortality, in part due to its location, difficulty of surgical treatment and the inability to get drugs through the blood-brain barrier, a protective barrier designed to keep a stable environment within and surrounding the brain.

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Brain tumors are the abnormal growth of brain cells that may be benign or metastatic. Brain tumors account for about 2.4% of all the tumor diagnosesandare most challenging due to their critically delicate location.

Broome and her team took what they know about the cancer's biology and of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), one of numerous growth factor proteins that regulates cell growth and division and is also over expressed on tumour cells in the brain.

With that in mind, they engineered a micelle that is a phospholipid nanocarrier, "a bit of fat globule", to deliver a concentrated dose of the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) to the GBM tumour cells.

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"Micelles of a certain size will cross the blood-brain barrier carrying a concentrated amount of TMZ," Broome explained about how the nanotechnology works. "The PDGF is used much like a postal address. The micelle gets it to the street, and the PDGF gets it to the house," she added.

The team is excited about the new research because it potentially points the way to a new treatment option for patients with GBM.

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"This paper is exciting because it demonstrates a novel approach to treating brain tumours, combining nanotechnology targeting to a marker of brain tumours with a specialised delivery system," said researcher and clinician Amy Lee Bredlau, director of MUSC Health's Pediatric Brain Tumour Programme.

"It will allow us eventually to target aggressive childhood and adult brain tumours," she added.

Source-IANS