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Injectable gel may be beneficial in the treatment of arthritis
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Investigators at Brigham and Women’s Hospital have constructed an injectable gel that may provide relief for arthritis patients through the targeted release of medicine.
Their findings, published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research, claim it is possible to have the gel dispense medicine on demand in response to enzymes associated with arthritic flare-ups. However, arthritis is not the only target of the new gel.
“We think that this platform could be useful for multiple medical applications, including the localized treatment of cancer, ocular disease and cardiovascular disease,” lead investigator Jeffrey Karp, PhD, stated in a Brigham and Women’s Hospital press release.
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Direct delivery of medicine
According to the release, one advantage the gel has over conventional arthritis treatments is its direct system of delivery. Drugs taken orally are unable to exert their effects immediately, and can be associated with adverse events due to the medicine being dispersed throughout the body. The gel would allow higher concentrations of medicine to be delivered directly into the joint.
“There are many instances where we would like to deliver drugs to a specific location, but it’s very challenging to do so without encountering major barriers,” Karp stated in the release.
Karp’s team worked on creating a gel through materials already designated by the FDA as being generally recognized as safe. The materials they discovered, the release noted, were not only capable of being coaxed into gel form but also potentially capable of releasing their drug payload when exposed to the inflammatory enzymes associated with arthritis.
In vitro disassembling
In the abstract, Karp and his fellow investigators wrote they had put together an injectable, self-assembled nanofibrous hydrogel “capable of encapsulation and release of agents in response to specific enzymes that are significantly upregulated in a diseased state, including metalloproteinases (MMP-2 and MMP-9) and esterases.”
Furthermore, they noted, the gels stood up to the forces of dynamic environments present in joints. The gels were also found to be stable following injection into healthy mouse joints and capable of disassembling in vitro to facilitate the release of encapsulated agents as a response to arthritic synovial fluid.
Reference:
- Vemula PK, Boilard E, Syed A, et al. On-demand drug delivery from self-assembled nanofibrous gels: A new approach for treatment of proteolytic disease. J Biomed Mater Res 97A: 103–110. doi: 10.1002/jbm.a.33020
- www.brighamandwomens.org
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