Implantable Device Targets Pancreatic Cancer

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States, in part because it is very difficult for chemotherapy drugs to reach the pancreas, which is located deep within the abdomen.

To help overcome that obstacle, researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have now developed a small, implantable device that delivers chemotherapy drugs directly to pancreatic tumors. In a study of mice, they found that this approach was up to 12 times more effective than giving chemotherapy drugs by intravenous injection, which is how most pancreatic cancer patients are treated.

"It's clear there is huge potential for a device that can localize treatment at the disease site," says Laura Indolfi, a postdoc in MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and the MGH Cancer Center, who is one of the study's lead authors. "You can implant our device to achieve a localized drug release to control tumor progression and potentially shrink [the tumor] to a size where a surgeon can remove it."

This thin, flexible film could also be adapted to treat other hard-to-reach tumors, according to the researchers, who described the device in the journal Biomaterials. Matteo Ligorio, an MGH research fellow, and David Ting, an MGH Cancer Center assistant physician, are also lead authors of the paper. Senior authors are Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at MIT; Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and Jeffrey Clark, director of clinical trials support at MGH.

Targeted delivery

Motivated in part by a call for "Bridge Project" grant applications, the MIT and MGH team launched this project a little more than three years ago with a focus on pancreatic cancer, which has a five-year overall survival rate of less than 6 percent. Injections of chemotherapy drugs often fail not only because the pancreas is so deep within the body, but also because pancreatic tumors have few blood vessels, making it harder for drugs to get in. Also, pancreatic tumors are often surrounded by a thick, fibrous coating that keeps drugs out.

In hopes that getting drugs directly to the tumor site would improve treatment, the researchers engineered a flexible polymer film that is made from a polymer called PLGA, which is widely used for drug delivery and other medical applications. The film can be rolled into a narrow tube and inserted through a catheter, so surgically implanting it is relatively simple. Once the film reaches the pancreas, it unfolds and conforms to the shape of the tumor.

"Because it's very flexible it can adapt to whatever size and shape the tumor will have," Indolfi says.

Page 1 of 2

• Next Page >