Open AccessAdvances in drug delivery to high grade gliomas
Author(s) -
Frosina Guido
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
brain pathology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.986
H-Index - 132
eISSN - 1750-3639
pISSN - 1015-6305
DOI - 10.1111/bpa.12423
Subject(s) - medicine , drug delivery , drug , brain cancer , glioma , brain tumor , oncology , cancer , disease , ommaya reservoir , pharmacology , chemotherapy , pathology , cancer research , chemistry , organic chemistry
If cancer is hard to be treated, brain cancer is even more, caused by the inability of many effective drugs given systemically to cross the blood brain and blood tumor barriers and reach adequate concentrations at the tumor sites. Effective delivery of drugs to brain cancer tissues is thus a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition to effectively target the disease. In order to analyze the current status of research on drug delivery to high grade gliomas (HGG‐WHO grades III and IV), the most frequent and aggressive brain cancers, a literature search was conducted in PubMed using the terms: “drug delivery and brain tumor” over the publication year 2015. Currently explored drug delivery techniques for HGG include the convection and permeabilization‐enhanced deliveries, drug‐releasing depots and Ommaya reservoirs. The efficacy/safety ratio widely varies among these techniques and the success of current efforts to increase this ratio widely varies as well.