Drugs Delivered Air Express

Aerosol drug delivery puts treatment on express route

By Rebecca Lentz

Think of the drugs to treat lung cancer as a train ride. Using today’s best-available medical care requires the train to travel hundreds of miles to get to the station.

What if there was a shortcut, a way to turn that extra long journey with many stops and bumps into a fast, smooth, nonstop trip?

There is a way, and Timothy Wiedmann of the College of Pharmacy is helping build the express route. His research—in which he collaborates with researchers from multiple disciplines— focuses on aerosol drug delivery for preventing and treating lung cancer. Wiedmann studies how to get drugs into a mist of fine particles that, when inhaled, targets the lungs.

In the lab, Wiedmann has used the aerosol form of the drug budesonide to treat lung cancer in animals. Results show this aerosol shrinks the cancerous lung tumors.

The lungs represent about 1 to 2 percent of the body weight so a patient would need about 1 to 2 percent of the amount of drug normally used. Because so little of the drug is necessary, it follows that fewer troubling side effects would occur. With an aerosol delivered directly to the lungs, patients might avoid side effects such as hair loss, intestinal inflammation, skin problems, and even hearing loss.

Although aerosol treatment for lung cancer in people is a long way off, this advance would be particularly good news for the 85 percent of people who die after receiving this diagnosis. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women.

Although aerosol drugs already exist for asthma and a few other conditions, Wiedmann sees many more possibilities. “The lungs hold great promise because of their ability to deliver drugs—starting through the inhaled air—to the rest of the body,” Wiedmann says. “Lungs have a lining that drugs can easily pass through, and the surface area of the lungs is about as big as a tennis court.”

Once studies and clinical trials are completed, this drug-delivery method could be used to treat tuberculosis, cystic fibrosis, and other lung disorders as well.

Wiedmann also is working with scientist Lee Wattenberg on chemoprevention, which is the use of drugs to prevent cancer. Development of aerosol delivery might play a role in chemoprevention as well, Wiedmann says.

“With prevention, you look at the population and ask ‘Who may get cancer?’ ” Wiedmann explains. “You identify the patient group and, in this case, give them the drug to prevent lung cancer.” The Food and Drug Administration is supporting efforts to identify people who are at risk of developing— but don’t yet have—cancer.

For now, researchers are concentrating on preventing recurrence of cancer in patients who have been successfully treated for it. Wiedmann’s group will study the effect of aerosol-delivered drugs following cancer surgery, which may be seen as prevention, but is considered a treatment by the FDA.

Wiedmann, who is also working with researchers in genetics and nanotechnology, became interested in aerosol delivery after a graduate student conducted studies in his lab.

Researchers have been working for 40 years to understand cancer and unravel its pathways, he says. The question becomes: Will they ever understand the disease? “Most of the time, researchers bump across (a cure or treatment) by accident,” Wiedmann says. “You bump into them and then take a step back to understand how it works.

“If you have a loved one who is dying of cancer, you do not want to understand the problem. You want a cure,” Wiedmann says. “It just may be that pharmaceutics can come up with the solution to the terrible problem of lung cancer.”