Localised Delivery of Chemotherapeutic Drugs

Dear Colleagues,

Systemic administration of chemotherapy is the mainstay for treating most types of cancer. However, due to off-target accumulation in healthy tissue, it results in serious unwanted side effects that limit the patient’s quality of life, as well as the length and dose of the chemotherapy. While the survival rate for most cancers has doubled over the last 40 years, hard-to-treat cancers, such as brain tumours and pancreatic cancer, have survival rates below 14%. With brain tumours, chemotherapy drugs have poor penetration through the blood–brain barrier (BBB), leading to sub-therapeutic concentrations at the tumour site. Similar problems are encountered with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma with the formation of rigid fibrotic tissue around the tumour acting as a physical barrier to systemic chemotherapy. Therefore, high systemic drug levels are required to achieve the therapeutic levels needed at the tumour site. The mainstay of treatment for both brain tumours and pancreatic cancer is surgical resection, which offers an opportunity for the local delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs directly to the tumour tissue offering a number of advantages such as a lower dose, increased patient tolerance, and reduced side effects due to the avoidance of systemic circulation. The aim of this Special Issue is to highlight current progress in the localised delivery of chemotherapeutic drugs.

Dr. Chris McConville
Guest Editor

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• chemotherapy
• cancer
• localised
• drug delivery
• in vivo characterisation