Grant: Project Grant

Liver cancer, or hepatocellular carcinoma, is a major health concern as it is one of the most common cancers in the world and the third most lethal. For advanced stages of the disease, the preferred treatment consist in the injection thought the liver arteries of chemotherapeutic drugs, designed to kill cancerous cells, and eventually embolization agent, which deprive the tumors from oxygen and nutriments by blocking their feeding vessels, thus causing their death. However, current techniques that are able to efficiently target the tumor areas, and spare healthy tissues, require the use of x-ray images and the navigation of a catheter from an artery in the leg, the femoral artery, or in the left arm, the radial artery, to the desired position in the liver. This procedure is time consuming and cannot be repeated too often for patient comfort and safety. We propose a non-invasive treatment that use a catheter implanted directly in the proper hepatic artery to deliver microbeads loaded with magnetic nanoparticles and chemotherapeutic drug, whose size is chosen to embolize the small arteries of the liver. These microbeads will be steered to the tumors using the magnetic force of a MRI scanner. Once in the feeding vessels of the tumor, they start to desegregate, progressively liberating the chemotherapeutic drug. This new method will allow for repeated targeted treatments that are a key element in the regression of liver tumors and the prolongation of the patient life.