Busulfan, which belongs to a family of drugs known as alkylating agents, is used to treat hematological malignancies, including chronic myelogenous leukemia.
This drug is given orally, which is normally an advantage but in this case causes problems because the rate at which the drug is absorbed into the bloodstream can vary tremendously from patient to patient. Drug developers have tried a variety of techniques to develop an injectable form of busulfan, but each of these methods has proven less than optimal. Now, however, investigators in France and Belgium have created a nanoparticle that appears to solve these issues and holds the promise of improving the utility of busulfan in cancer therapy.
Reporting its work in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part B: Applied Biomaterials, a team of investigators led by Ruxandra Gref, Ph.D., at Paris-Sud University, in France, describes the variety of polymer nanoparticles that it created in an attempt to find one that would safely encapsulate busulfan and release it in a steady manner into the bloodstream. The two chief challenges the researchers faced were that busulfan is chemically reactive toward many of the materials used to make nanoparticles and that the drug itself tends to form crystals when dissolved in water.