University of Mississippi Researchers Design 3D Printed Implant to Ensure that Chemotherapy Targets Only the Tumor

A group of researchers at the University of Mississippi has created tiny capsules loaded with an anticancer drug and incorporated them into a small implant produced using 3D printing. The idea is to place this implant next to the tumor so that the drug acts locally rather than spreading throughout the body. So far, it has been tested on breast cancer cell cultures in the laboratory.

The study was published in the journal Pharmaceutical Research and focuses on two innovations: a 3D printing technique called FRESH and a type of nano-drug delivery known as spanlastics. Each of these capsules measures between 200 and 300 nanometers. To put that into perspective, a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

Elom Doe (left), a doctoral student in Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Jaidev Chakka (right), a principal investigator at the College of Pharmacy. (Photo credit: Hunt Mercier/Ole Miss Digital Imaging Services).

Chemotherapy is administered orally or intravenously and travels through the bloodstream to the tumor. Along the way, it also attacks other rapidly dividing cells—namely, those in the scalp, the intestinal lining, and the skin. This explains the hair loss, nausea, vomiting, and anemia that often accompany treatment. “Delivering chemotherapeutics is always a nasty business because of the severe side effects that the patients experience,” says Jaidev Chakka, a principal scientist at the School of Pharmacy and one of the study’s authors. “The goal of this publication is: ‘How we can minimize those side effects?'”