Biomodulation- targeting bone disease by a Trojan horse

In the last three decades no new drugs have been developed to treat orthopedic tumors. Old drugs are still being used with known common systemic side-effects.

The percentage of poor-responders is high and if treatment fails there are no alternatives.The goal of this project is thus to explore the possibility of improving the delivery of the existing bone tumor drugs.

Our preliminary experiments indicate that we can use certain tumor drugs that bind chemically to synthetic hydroxyapatite (HA) particles.

One example is doxorubicin, a cornerstone drug used for the treatment of Ewing’s sarcoma and osteosarcoma.We propose that synthetic HA particles are used to fill the void after bone tumor resection.

Once the chemotherapy regimen starts post-operatively, the HA particles within the tumor act as Trojan horses and recruit systemically circulating cytotoxic drug. High amounts of cytostatic will reach the tumor, compared to the conventional methods.

High drug concentration implies increased tumor eradication effect, increased survival, reduced risk of drug resistance, reduced local tumor recurrence and potentially fewer side-effects.In this project, we will test the concept using in-vitro studies to screen for additional HA binding drugs, and in-vivo bone tumor models to study the tumor eradication efficacy, side effects and organ toxicity from the proposed drug delivery concept.