Trans-Arterial Micro-Perfusion For Improved Drug Delivery
The majority of benign and malignant tumors thrive in a highly vascularized microenvironment. Tumors depend on existing or newly formed blood supply to receive oxygen and nutrients, making tumor vasculature an important conduit or “highway” for anticancer therapeutics. Thus, chemotherapies and other treatments can be administered systemically through the veins (intravenous or IV delivery) in order to reach the tumor site. However, hypovascular tumors have a paucity of blood vessels that feed into certain solid tumors. This characteristic of these tumors presents a challenge to deliver drugs systemically as adequate dose levels of effective therapeutics are limited from getting to target cells and most current chemotherapies have an already narrow therapeutic index (the delta between the efficacious dose and a toxic dose).