Filling the tumor with oxygen makes it more amenable to treatment. In seeking ways to deliver more oxygen to tumors, researchers turned to an unlikely source of inspiration. Foam used in cooking, like the whipped cream baristas use to top hot chocolate. They harnessed the same whipping his siphon used in the culinary world to create a food-based foam that can be injected directly into tumors, effectively reducing tumor resistance in mice. I showed that.
In the body, tumors maintain hypoxia or anoxia. This makes them notoriously resistant to common treatments such as chemotherapy and radiation. I’ve used augmentation techniques. “However, the challenge was how to provide effective amounts of oxygen in a safe and controlled manner,” said James Byrne, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Iowa.
So Byrne and fellow researchers at UI, Harvard Medical School, MIT and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center set out to find a way to inject oxygen directly into the tumor. Turning to the world of molecular gastronomy, which involves turning various edible substances into foam, they reverse-engineered the whip siphon to use oxygen instead of the more standard nitrous oxide. The form was named gas-filled material, or GeM.
“These GeMs are very simple and have only three ingredients: a gas, a blowing agent and a thickener,” says Byrne. to incorporate high concentrations of gas into small amounts of these biocompatible materials, which can be injected or implanted into tissue and allow controlled release of gas over time.”
In one iteration of the foam, the researchers used a polymer composed of natural carbohydrates similar to the candy Pop Rocks.
The researchers then tested mice with prostate cancer or a type of sarcoma known as malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumor (MPNST). MPNSTs are very difficult to operate on and can easily damage the surrounding nerves, so finding ways to make them more accessible to the best current treatments could go a long way toward improving patient outcomes. There is a possibility. In both types of tumors, new forms of oxygen delivery enhanced tumor responsiveness to chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Because the foam is made from edible material and oxygen, researchers feel that, if successfully tested in humans, it will expand the treatment as another tool in the cancer-fighting toolbox It also contains ideas about how to fight cancer (likely that of oxygen).
“One aspect of this project that really got me excited was that it combined the principles of cancer biology with materials science to create something really impactful,” says a research scientist in Byrne’s lab. said Jianling Bi, lead author of the study.
A paper on this research has been published in a journal. advanced science.
Source: University of Iowa Health Care by EurekAlert
