Blood vessels, such as highways and roads that reach most addresses, run through almost all tissues of the body. The problem for doctors is that drugs of this transportation system moving almost everywhere find their way to many more nooks and crannies than they are supposed to. Now, German researchers have found a low-tech solution to get the goods to specific places of the body: tiny polymer spheres with drugs that can be accommodated in specific sets of narrow vessels called capillaries before releasing their loads. The technique, reported in the next month of Nature Biotechnology , could provide a new vehicle for delivering drugs to people with heart disease and other ailments.
heart attacks occur when clogged arteries prevent the heart to circulate enough blood to sustain itself. Treatment is possible to create new pathways for blood to reach the heart muscle using a protein called fibroblast growth factor (FGF) to stimulate the growth of new blood vessels. FGF, use has however not found widespread as a treatment again because of two major problems :. Enzymes quickly disable FGF outstanding, and high doses can dilate blood vessels and lower blood pressure dangerously
To deliver FGF where it is needed more precisely, a team led by physiologist Wulf Ito Institute Max Planck physiology and clinical research in Bad Nauheim, Germany, FGF attached to small letters - resin spheres, 7 micrometers in diameter, which are too big to squeeze through capillaries. A sphere of drug loaded "looks like a golf ball with FGF in small bumps," says Ito.
The researchers tested the technique on healthy pigs, injection of spheres in an artery feeds a part of the heart muscle. in seconds, 60% of the spheres inserted into capillaries fed by the artery. the remaining 40% were probably slightly smaller and squeaked through, said Ito. Do not worry, the rest of body "gets a very, very small dose," he said. Indeed, the remaining spheres were so diffusely distributed outside of the heart tissue that researchers could not find one.
If other research shows that injecting spheres trigger a new hair growth, they could have "huge clinical implications," said Elazer Edelman, director of the Harvard-MIT biomedical engineering Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Already, similar spheres get their first test in people: Edelman has conducted tests in which FGF-bearing areas are located in people's chests as they are open for coronary bypass surgery. "It will be interesting to see how these injectable spheres work in clinical trials," he said.
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