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Hello. My name is João Nuno Moreira,
I work at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology and at
the Faculty of Pharmacy at University of Coimbra in Portugal.
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The goal of my talk today will be to answer this simple question,
why do we need drug delivery systems specifically within the field of oncology?
So I'm going through several examples that will help us out
to answer in a very simple manner to this very simple question.
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We have a summary of the main side effects that
oncological patients go through when they are treated with conventional chemotherapy.
Now, the problem of conventional chemotherapy upon
intravenous injection results from the fact that
these drugs have a very high volume of distribution,
meaning that these drugs once injected in the blood,
they are rapidly redistributed throughout the body and so they tend to accumulate in
healthy organs where there are a number of
different cells that they have a very high rate of proliferation.
For example in the bone marrow,
GI tract or hair follicles.
It is the accumulation and these chaotic biodistribution of
these drugs that leads to a number of side effects that are
summarized on this slide like for example
mouth sores and this can be something in a very high extent that might lead
to the inability of the patient to actually be
fat in a regular manner or alopecia, so hair falling.
So this means that under these circumstances,
oncologists have two choices;
either they stopped treatment or they must give
the patient suboptimal doses and often these ends up in treatment failure.
