Each year, around 10,000 patients in the US are diagnosed with gliobastoma multiforme (GBM), which is the most common, aggressive and high-grade form of these brain tumors (82% of malignant gliomas). Currently, the median survival for this disease is around 21 months after diagnosis. Despite advances in the different methods of therapy (i.e. radiotherapy, immunotherapy and chemotherapy), the prognosis for gliomas has not been dramatically improved through the years. For tumors located in the brain, systemic delivery of agents has to overcome many obstacles for the successful delivery of the drug to the site including the critical step of having to cross the blood brain barrier (BBB). Due to the difficulty and high cost related to developing new therapeutics, focus should be placed on optimizing available drugs by ways such as delivering them locally using biomaterials. Local delivery of an anti-angiogenic factor (i.e. minocycline) and systemic delivery of a chemotherapy agent (i.e. bis-chloroethylnitrosourea (BCNU) or temozolomide (TMZ)) has been shown to improve median survival compared to the delivery of the systemic delivery of the chemotherapy agent alone in a rodent glioma model. Thus far, a lot of studies have been performed to study the delivery of both of these factors systemically or one factor systemically and the other factor locally to treat gliomas. However, the local deliver of both of these agents by combining both of them in an implantable device has not been investigated. It is hypothesized that the local delivery of both a chemotherapy agent that will impede the growth of cancer cells and an anti-angiogenic factor that will block blood vessel formation can better inhibit cancer progression compared to the delivery of these drugs systemically or locally alone. An ideal therapy should target tumor cells and avoid damaging non-tumor cells which can result in memory impairment, decline in brain function and low quality of life. CD44 and CD105 have been shown to be highly expressed on human glioma cell lines and endothelial cells, respectively and thus we further hypothesized that biomaterials functionalized with antibody against these markers can decrease non-targeted toxicity and increase bioactivity on targeted cells. The overall goal of this proposal is to develop a biodegradable composite system that has the ability to sustain the release of a chemotherapy and an anti-angiogenic agent and target cells of interest for glioma which may also be applied to other tumor types. The results from this work will contribute to the development of more effective therapies for the treatment of brain gliomas.
Each year, around 10,000 patients in the US are diagnosed with the most common, aggressive and high-grade form of glioma (malignant brain tumors), gliobastoma multiforme (GBM) and the median survival for this disease is around 21 months after diagnosis despite treatment with surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Systemic concurrent delivery of a chemotherapy agent that will impede the growth of cancer cells and an anti-angiogenic factor that will block blood vessel formation have been shown to be advantageous for the treatment of brain tumors; however, the outcomes have still been very modest mostly in part due to the difficulty in crossing the blood brain barrier which exists to protect the brain from external elements. Due to the difficulty and high cost related to developing new therapeutics, this proposed study aims to optimize existing therapies by focusing on applying biomaterials to locally deliver currently available chemotherapy and anti-angiogenic drugs concurrently at the tumor site using functionalized materials that will target cells of interest and thus, further decrease non-targeted toxicity and increase bioactivity on targeted cells.
