Prostate cancer and central precocious puberty - linked through improper gonadal steroid levels - are most common in either the elderly or youth populations. Similar gonadal steroid problems also connected to endometriosis. Some traditional methodologies for treating these illnesses involves daily injections of medicine, which can become painful or be forgotten, result in under-dosing. Los Gatos Research is developing an alternative method for delivering time-controlled drug formulations that is practically pain free. Furthermore, the novel technology provides an extended, programmable release platform that helps patients avoid the need to remember to take medication (particularly important for portions of the elderly population) and offers the potential to use less medicine to produce the same effect due to the ability to customize the delivery to the individual patient. The technologies developed in this proposed project enable programmable, microfluidic transdermal patches to provide a means for delivering large molecular weight drug formulations that is controlled, painless, and direct.
The specific aims of the Phase II project include upgrading the unique programmable transdermal patches, testing and validating their performance capabilities, optimizing them for rapid, controlled delivery of medication to control gonadal steroid levels, and conducting initial pre- clinical trials of the patches.
Prostate cancer is the second most common form of cancer in men;it is estimated that nearly 18% of men will develop prostate cancer during their lives, with a 15% mortality rate;endometriosis affects nearly 90 million women of reproductive age world wide;and central precocious puberty (entering puberty too quickly) affects roughly 4-5% of children in the United States alone. The work proposed for this NIH SBIR project is focused on developing both a more effective and less painful method for delivering drugs to fight these diseases through the novel use of programmable transdermal drug delivery.
