At the Health Sciences Center, the laboratory of Dr. Pavan Muttil is making strides in developing a new method to target tumor growth within the lungs by using the simple power of magnets.
Muttil and his students have developed a magnetic vest that, when worn by a cancer patient, may help direct cancer drugs to their intended target without damaging the rest of the body, he said.
The problem with current treatment options, Muttil said, is the difficulty in sending tumor-fighting drugs directly to the tumor instead of circulating them throughout the entire body.
“For treating lung cancer, the standard care of therapy is injectable drugs,” Muttil said. “The drug travels all over the place, and a very small percentage of that drug actually reaches the lung. Cancer-treating drugs are very toxic, so the whole thought here was, ‘can we deliver the drugs directly to the lungs?’”
The toxic side effects of chemotherapeutic drugs are notoriously hard on patients, including nausea, vomiting and hair loss, he said. The hope is that by reducing the amount of the drug ending up in non-cancerous parts of the body, the side effects of these drugs might be reduced — and it may increase their effectiveness at treating the actual tumor as well.
Muttil found that other researchers have tried to get the drugs straight into the lungs by administering them through inhalation, a method similar to inhalers used by asthma patients. However, despite the direct path of the drugs into the lungs, the tumors themselves still weren’t specifically targeted.
“If, let’s say, on my left lung I have a tumor; OK, I want to treat that. But my right side is a healthy lung — nothing is wrong with that side of the lung. When I’m taking a drug into my lungs as an inhalant, what happens is the drug goes uniformly everywhere (in the lungs),” Muttil said. “It’s sort of treating the tumor, but at the same time it’s causing some side effects to the other lung.”
To address this problem, Muttil and his team developed a dry powder containing both the cancer-treating drug and iron oxide, a magnetic compound of iron and oxygen, that can be inhaled by cancer patients. It is his hope that cancer patients will be able to self-administer the drug at home using an inhaler, he said.
“The way you would use (an inhaler) for asthma, you’re going to use it the same way for cancer patients. You don’t need a healthcare provider to inject this,” Muttil said. “So, in this case a patient can do it, if they’re not in the advanced stage of cancer. They can do this at home.”
During this process, the patient would wear a brace containing a high-powered magnet positioned on the chest, directly above the tumor, Muttil explained. The iron oxide is attracted to the magnet, bringing the tumor-fighting drug with it.
Much of the work in developing this potential treatment was performed by Amber McBride, a Ph.D. candidate. So far, McBride said her results show a 23 percent difference in the amount of dry powder localizing in the targeted lung versus the non-cancerous lung. She said she is enthusiastic about her research and hopes her work can positively influence the lives of cancer patients.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
“It’s great to work on a translational project — research that translates from lab bench to bedside. And it’s wonderful to work on a project this meaningful, that could potentially have a lot of impact,” McBride said. “It makes more sense to administer an inhaled chemotherapy to treat lung cancer, rather than conventionally injected drugs that affect the whole body.”
McBride said she feels this research is particularly important because “lung cancer is the number-one killer among all cancers.”
According to the American Lung Association, it is estimated that almost 160,000 Americans will die from lung cancer in 2014. That’s more than the next three most common cancers — colon, breast and pancreatic — combined. However, McBride said she feels optimistic about the future of inhaled medications.
“As a student it’s been great to watch and help Amber from the beginning to end,” said Dominique Price, a fellow doctoral candidate in Muttil’s lab. “This is one of those projects where, in talking to physicians at the beginning of the project, they said ‘this will never work, why are you even trying?’ I think she’s shown that even if you have naysayers, if you believe in your science, keep going.”
Lauren Topper is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
