Novel drug delivery system using acoustic control of intratumoral drug distribution

Background/introduction An approach of drug delivery to hypovascular tumor tissues is proposed. For such tumor tissues, it is difficult to deliver anti-tumor agents at enough concentration and duration by either systemic or local administration. If we could manipulate the distribution of locally injected drugs by ultrasound, an efficient drug therapy would be possible. We have found that locally injected perfluorocarbon droplets (PCNDs) induce mechanical effects when exposed to pulsed HIFU at intensity of several kW/cm2 and further that controllable tissue destruction is possible with the effects. In this paper, preliminary results on a new drug delivery system (DDS) by utilizing such effects will be presented.