Magnetic Microspheres in Drug Delivery

Although chemotherapy is one of the primary modalities in the treatment of neoplastic disease, it is severely limited in usefulness due to relative nonspecificity with a resultant high systemic toxicity. To a great extent, tumor cells are only marginally more susceptible to most anti-tumor agents compared to normal rapidly dividing host cells. As a result, for any oncolytic agents, there is a very narrow therapeutic index. This problem could be alleviated by the selective targeting of the desired drug to the tumor. In this fashion a therapeutically high local tumor concentration of the drug could be achieved with the administration of a significantly lower total systemic dose. In addition, systemic side effects would be virtually eliminated.