“Targeted drug delivery” growing trend for many chronic medical conditions.

Targeted drug delivery, sometimes called smart drug delivery, is a method of delivering medication to a patient in a manner that increases the concentration of the medication in some parts of the body relative to others.

Despite the progress in techniques for cancer prevention, detection, and treatment, as well as for increasing the public awareness in recent years, this disease is projected to become the leading cause of death worldwide. Advancements in omics, analytical procedures, and high throughput screening in the last five years have led to the realization that human diseases and especially cancer are more complex than were originally conceived. Cancer is not a static entity that can be easily monitored and manipulated. It is characterized by a dynamic and time-dependent network of constantly altered molecular and cellular interactions between players in different pathways. This network is not invariable and rigid but is constantly reshaped and altered conforming to the pliable signaling processes/responses implicated. Its complexity is apparent by the fact that the disease state is not a disruption of a single node or specific nodes in the network organism but is organism-patient dependent, thus requiring personalized perspective approaches.

Numerous challenges hamper effective cancer treatment and development of effective drugs such as ineffective therapeutic drug concentration reaching the tumor site, life-threatening side-effects caused by nonspecific tissue distribution of anticancer agents, and acquired resistance of the cancer cell upon chemotherapy that triggers cross-resistance to a wide range of different drugs.

Such multifactorial states require the development of very delicate approaches in the course of the drug discovery pipeline. The scientific roots of the drug development philosophy should be shifted from the traditional concept of the “magic bullet” drug (i.e., scalped for a single drug target) to the formulation of a navigated vehicle which could spatio-temporally deliver the drug in the correct location and the appropriate time. Thus, the term targeted drug delivery should give its place to navigated drug delivery since it is not only the cytotoxic drug that targets a specific cellular location but rather a vehicle that navigates the course of the loaded drug to the appropriate site of action. Such drug loaded and navigated vehicles in order to enhance the selective uptake of the cytotoxic agent by the tumor cells and spare the normal cells, should consist of a multidimensional architecture.

“Pain Pump” FDA approved Target Drug Delivery

With targeted drug delivery, a pain pump delivers pain medication directly to the fluid around the spinal cord. This may result in effective pain relief at lower doses and with fewer side effects compared to oral medications, which go through your circulatory system.

How Targeted Drug Delivery Works

A targeted drug delivery system delivers pain medication directly to the fluid around the spinal cord, in an area called the intrathecal space.

The system includes a drug pump that is connected to a thin, flexible tube called a catheter. Both the pump and the catheter are fully implanted under the skin.

Because the pump releases medication directly to the pain receptors near the spine instead of going through your circulatory system, pain relief can be achieved with a small fraction of the oral medication dose.

Studies have also reported that targeted drug delivery provided pain relief in many patients who could not achieve adequate control even with high doses of oral pain medications.²