A new device being researched for bladder-disease may also show potential in treating bladder cancer:
"A bladder disease called interstitial cystitis affects at least a half-million people in the United States, mostly women, with perhaps an equal number undiagnosed. At present, there are no good options for such people; the only treatment that reduces the symptoms of painful and very frequent urination, which can be debilitating and make it impossible to work, is an infusion of the drug lidocaine into the bladder through a catheter, but the treatment only provides brief relief and needs to be repeated frequently.
Researchers at MIT think they have found a much better solution. They fill a small medical-grade silicone tube with the solid drug, after drilling a tiny hole in the tube using a laser beam. A shape-memory wire made of nitinol is threaded through the tube, which is then straightened out, placed in a catheter, and inserted into the bladder. As soon as it is released there, the nitinol wire causes the device to spring back into a pretzel-like shape, which prevents it from being expelled from the bladder during urination, and thus it can slowly, steadily release the drug over a two-week period — which would typically be long enough to treat an interstitial cystitis flare-up, something that may occur about three times a year.
The device, developed by Heejin Lee SM ’04, PhD ’10 and Michael Cima, the Sumitomo Electric Industries Professor of Engineering, is undergoing phase-1 clinical trials, and is described in detail in a paper in the Journal of Controlled Release (available online now, and scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue in print). Though it is initially being tested specifically for interstitial cystitis, Cima says that the same delivery system, if all goes well in the clinical trials, could also be used to deliver drugs for other bladder diseases, including chemotherapy for bladder cancer — the form of cancer that has the highest recurrence rate of all, in part because it is so difficult to deliver drugs to the bladder in a sustained way."
Read More: http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-approach-bladder-disease-treatment.html
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