Magnetic liposomes

In Drug Delivery

Figure 2: Drug delivery by injection

Advantages

There are many diseases that remain untreated and methods of drug delivery which in themselves could be harmful to patients  who undergo treatment.

Tumors still remain very problematic to treat, especially if the tumor resides deep within the body, requiring opening the patient and surgically removing the tumor.  A process such as this is very difficult for a surgeon and as a result very life threatening for the patient.

Traditional drug delivery methods have many harmful traits. Oral administration and injection may be ineffectively administered and as such may result in high toxic effects.  Furthermore, these types of methods administer the drug throughout a patients body, and only a relatively low amount of drug reaches the diseased area. Additionally, chemotherapy affects the entire body and not just the cancerous region, thus weakening the patient.

By creating a capsule which can be controlled and guided to a certain area within the body, drugs within the capsule can be effectively administered in the necessary dosage without worrying about any toxic effects and without administering the drugs throughout the entire body.

BME 240 UC Irvine

 

E-mail: bshergil@uci.edu

Figure 5: Nanoparticles in microdroplets (green) are delivered along the airways (brown) towards the lungs (grey) guided by the localized magnetic field created by the magnet (red).