Drug Delivery Tracking: New Imaging Method Reveals Cellular Targets
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vCATCH: Mapping Drug Pathways Within the Body for Safer Medicines
When we take a medicine, we are mainly interested in whether it effectively works. We rarely think about where it actually ends up in the body and in which places it acts outside of the main target. A team of researchers has now developed a method that can show this pathway much more precisely, which could help understand side effects and design safer drugs.
A team from Scripps research developed an imaging technique that can identify individual cells where a drug reaches.
The authors describe the method in a study published in the journal Cell where thay used this approach in mice to map the sites of action of two widely prescribed oncology drugs.
Usually, the researchers say, after a drug enters the body, its interactions with cellular targets are difficult to track: traditional methods can measure the concentration in an organ, but they cannot show exactly which types of cells are involved, nor in which other cells it unexpectedly ends up interacting directly, beyond the targeted targets.
Clinical trials can demonstrate efficacy and identify common side effects, but “what” the drug does in every cell in the body has not been accessible until now.
Previous “tracking” methods relied either on homogenizing tissue for analysis or on low-resolution techniques