September 28, 2006

Kannan and Karmanos group find success with in vitro dendrimer drug therapy

Polymers, particularly dendrimers, hold promise for treating many types of illnesses according to recent findings from Michigan researchers. Rangaramanujam Kannan, associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Wayne State University, Larry Matherly, professor of pharmacology at the Karmanos Cancer Institute and a co-investigator on the study, and several collaborators attached a commonly used anti-cancer drug, methotrexate, to PAMAM, or polyamidoamine, dendrimers. They used two different types of end groups: amines and carboxyl acid. They then compared the effect of each version of dendrimer-drug therapy with free methotrexate in cancer cells cultured in vitro. What they found differed from previous studies, where in vitro polymer-drug conjugates have had less of an effect than the drug alone: both dendrimer-methotrexate combinations killed significantly more cancer cells than the free drug. Perhaps even more noteworthy was that this same dendrimer-drug pairing, known as conjugate A in the study, killed cancer cells that were resistant to the drug.

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