By decreasing the cost of drug discovery, a novel invention could potentially allow for increased access to high-quality healthcare and benefit cancer patients receiving personalized chemotherapy treatments. The details were published in a recent issue of the journal Biomaterials.
“Right now, cancer patients receive chemotherapy treatments that are based on the accumulated knowledge of what has worked best for people with similar cancers,” said Steven Lenhert, a Florida State biology assistant professor and principal investigator on the research effort. “This is the case because hospitals don’t have the technology to test thousands of different chemotherapy mixtures on the tumor cells of an individual patient. This technology could give them access to that capability, making the treatments truly personalized and much more effective.”
Lenhert’s invention miniaturizes the first phase of the drug discovery process used by pharmaceutical companies called throughput screening. The miniaturized method involves printing all of the compounds on a single glass surface and then testing them on cells using a technique involving liposome microarrays. Utilization of this technology in the pharmaceutical industry would make the cost of the drug discovery process a thousand times cheaper, create the potential for personalized cancer treatments, and allow for more affordable, higher-quality healthcare options.
Lenhert and his research group are now working on scaling their nanotechnology up to the high levels needed to achieve medically relevant benefits.
“We have taken an important first step in making liposome microarray technology viable for the pharmaceutical and medical industries,” said Aubrey Kusi-Appiah, a graduate student in Lenhert’s research group and first author on the published work. “We have established that it can be done.”
Source: FSU.