7.27.2010

SPEAKER:
Yolonda Colson, MD, PhD, Attending Cardiothoracic Surgeon, Division of Thoracic Surgery, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Director, Women's Lung Cancer Program and Associate Professor in Surgery, Harvard Medical School

MODERATOR:
Jeffrey Borenstein, PhD, Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory; Co-Program Leader, Tissue Engineering, CIMIT

Video not available.

Forum Summary

There are 1.5 million new cases of cancer in the U.S. every year, resulting in annual costs of over $90 billion.  The majority of new cancers are solid tumors, and many of these tumors are amenable to resection.  Unfortunately, recurrence rates remain high for many types of cancer.  Preventing localized and regional recurrences would improve patient outcomes, so researchers in the laboratory of Yolonda Colson, MD, PhD, are seeking new ways to prevent recurrence.

One potential application of their work involves mesothelioma, a type of lung cancer with a five-year survival rate of less than fifteen percent.  After a resection, the cancer recurs between fifty and eighty percent of the time, and sixty to eighty percent of recurrences are locoregional.  Intracavitary chemotherapy can be given when a tumor is resected, but it is challenging to achieve a high local concentration of the drug for a prolonged period.  With this challenge in mind, Dr. Colson’s team has designed expansile nanoparticles carrying the drug Paclitaxel.  These nanoparticles release their chemotherapeutic contents when they expand in response to the acidic environment, such as when inside a cell’s endosome.  In this manner, the nanoparticles deliver a high dose of chemotherapy to tumor cells while limiting side effects experienced by other cells in the body.               

Dr. Colson and her collaborators are also hoping that their nanoparticles will someday be used to target tumor cells that have traveled to lymph nodes.  When the nanoparticles are placed at the site of a tumor, they are carried into the body via the same lymphatic vessels that transport metastatic cells.  In this way, the drug-carrying nanoparticles are transported to those lymph nodes that have potentially been exposed to cancerous cells.    

Finally, researchers in Dr. Colson’s laboratory have developed drug-eluting films capable of preventing local recurrences at resection sites.  Their film releases its drug slowly, preventing the drug from quickly being cleared from the resection site.  The researchers have demonstrated superior efficacy in small animals, and in the future, they hope to conduct safety, feasibility, toxicity, and pharmacokinetic studies in large animals, hopefully followed by preliminary clinical trials.

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