New injectable 'biogel' helps destroy cancerous tumours (Video)

Injectable drugs are pictured inside an injection room at a hospital in Shanghai May 4, 2014. Picture taken May 4, 2014. Reuters/Aly Song

A new intelligent “biogel” has been found to effectively deliver anti-cancer agents through injection, which scientists claim could directly go to cancerous tumours and kill them.

The technology, developed by researchers at the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre, or CRCHUM, has already been successfully tested in the laboratory. If it works in patients, the therapy could one day revolutionize treatment for many forms of cancer, according to the team.

Found to be compatible with anti-cancer immune cells, the biogel is liquid at room temperature, which facilitates its injection, but quickly takes on a cohesive and resistant structure at 37 degrees Celsius, the normal human body temperature. The non-toxic formulation is used to encapsulate these cells and eventually administer them using a syringe or catheter into the tumour or directly beside it.

“Instead of injecting these cells or anti-cancer drugs throughout the entire body via the bloodstream, we can treat the cancer locally. We hope that this targeted approach will improve current immunotherapies,” says Réjean Lapointe, co-author of the study that was recently published in Biomaterials.

Currently, one form of immunotherapy being employed is adoptive cell therapy, wherein cancer patients are treated with anti-cancer immune cells. The cells used, known as T lymphocytes or T cells, are produced naturally by the body and have the ability to destroy cancer cells. However, according to the researchers, T cells are generally too weak and too few to eradicate the cancer alone. As a result, T cells are cultivated in the laboratory and then reinjected into the patient’s blood.

While this form of immunotherapy has shown promising results in cases of advanced cancer, it is not always possible to generate enough T cells, the team says. Worse, they caution that high doses of interleukin-2, a hormone added to maximize the therapy, produces a toxic effect.

With the biogel technique, only a few dozen million T cells need to be administered, instead of the billions currently required, Lapointe explains. They can also administer compounds that ‘awaken’ the immune system to fight against cancer, he adds.

The recipe for this promising biogel was developed by Sophie Lerouge, a researcher at the CRCHUM and professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. The compound is made from chitosane, a biodegradable material extracted from the shells of crustaceans, to which gelling agents are added, Lerouge says.

To test its efficacy, the biogel was successfully tested in several in vitro models, including melanoma and kidney cancer. “The T lymphocytes in the gel are functional and can grow for two to three weeks, be released from the gel, and kill the cancerous cells,” Lapointe says.

For their next step, the researchers seek to demonstrate the effectiveness of the biogel in animals and humans.

Earlier this month, a team of researchers at the University of South Australia and their colleagues in Dresden, Germany, have genetically engineered algae to become therapeutic nanoporous particles. They say these tiny algae can potentially be used to destroy cancer cells in the human body when loaded with chemotherapeutic drugs, without harming healthy cells.