Microfluidic device to investigate targeted drug delivery systems
December 2018
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
In recent years, there has been a big effort to develop efficient strategies to deliver antitumor therapeutic agents. The lack of understanding of the mechanisms underlying the transport of targeted drugs to tissue-specific sites is a crucial limitation. Thus, there is a need to improve in vitro platforms to better recapitulate the key aspects of the delivery of antitumor drugs while overcoming the complexity of in vivo modelling. Here, a 3D microvessel is developed using human endothelial cells positioned around a cylinder and surrounded by an extracellular matrix containing human breast cancer cells to model tumor microenvironment and study the differences between free doxorubicin or a liposomal formulation of this drug. The results show that the method of drug delivery influences transendothelial migration and tumor uptake. Moreover, it was possible to study the kinetics of the drugs and investigate the mechanisms of drug transport through the endothelium. Overall, the researchers propose a model that can be customized to replicate specific tumor microenvironments and better understand and optimize different drug delivery systems.
Chemotherapeutic drug delivery and quantitative analysis of proliferation, apoptosis, and migration in a tissue-engineered three-dimensional microvessel model of the tumor microenvironment
Peter C Searson
Added on: 10-19-2021
[1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsbiomaterials.8b00877[2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/ffebe454-ed9a-47cf-8a33-8cf70c1b7d38
