Trans Arterial Micro Perfusion For Improved Drug Delivery

By Shaun Bagai, CEO, RenovoRx Inc.

The majority of benign and malignant tumors thrive in a highly vascularized microenvironment. Tumors depend on existing or newly formed blood supply to receive oxygen and nutrients, making tumor vasculature an important conduit or "highway" for anticancer therapeutics. Thus, chemotherapies and other treatments can be administered systemically through the veins (intravenous or IV delivery) in order to reach the tumor site. However, hypovascular tumors have a paucity of blood vessels that feed into certain solid tumors. This characteristic of these tumors presents a challenge to deliver drugs systemically as adequate dose levels of effective therapeutics are limited from getting to target cells and most current chemotherapies have an already narrow therapeutic index (the delta between the efficacious dose and a toxic dose).

Trans-arterial micro-perfusion (TAMP) is a novel approach designed to use pressure to deliver therapeutic agents directly to tumor sites, enabling precision medicine at a locoregional level. Unlike systemic drug delivery methods, TAMP targets specific tumor regions, to minimize systemic toxicities and increase concentration of a therapy delivered at the tumor site.

In oncology, systemic drug delivery methods often fall short to deliver to the target site, especially in difficult-to-access tumors such as pancreatic, biliary, brain, lung, or bladder cancer. The emergence of TAMP has enabled a new era of precision medicine, with significant advantages in the management of challenging malignancies.

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