Biomaterials for Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering
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Biomaterials for Drug Delivery and Tissue Engineering Robert Langer Abstract The following article is an edited transcript based on the Von Hippel Award presentation by Robert Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on November 30, 2005, at the Materials Research Society Fall Meeting in Boston. Langer was honored with MRS’s highest award for his “pioneering accomplishments in the science and application of biomaterials in drug delivery and tissue engineering, particularly in inventing the use of materials for protein and DNA delivery, and for his achievements in interdisciplinary research which have generated new medical products, created new fields of biomaterials science, and inspired research programs throughout the world.” Keywords: biological, biomedical, microstructure, tissue.
Introduction I am greatly honored to receive the MRS Von Hippel Award, and I am also excited to see biomaterials as a field recognized by this award. In this presentation, I would like to talk about how I became involved in the field of biomaterials and about some of the research my group and I have conducted to understand and create biomaterials that could be useful in various areas of medicine. First, let me provide a bit of motivation for improved drug delivery systems. Whenever, we, as patients, take drugs, whether by swallowing pills or taking injections, the level of the drug in our bloodstreams usually starts out very low, then rises, and then goes down again. We then take the drug again, and the same thing happens. At the peaks, those drug levels could be toxic, while in the valleys, the drug might not be effective at all. Yet almost all drugs are administered in this problematic way. More than 100,000 deaths every year can be attributed to people taking prescription drugs in the correct way, often because of that very fact.1,2 That figure, by the way, is four times the number of deaths caused annually by AIDS in the United States. We and others wanted to find a method of administering drugs in such a way that they would go into the desired range and stay there, something that very
MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 31 • JUNE 2006
few drugs do. Accomplishing that would be a major step toward preventing side effects. Controlling drug delivery could also lead to new medical therapies, as I will later demonstrate.
Polymer-Based Drug Delivery Systems During the past 25 years, a whole new field of materials-based drug delivery systems has emerged. These polymer-based systems have had a dramatic impact on safe and effective drug delivery. One of the earliest developments, for example, was a nitroglycerin patch used to treat angina. This patch, approved in the early 1980s, is a thin polymer system containing nitroglycerin. Placed on the skin, it delivers the drug over a 24-hour period. Systems like these can be used also to deliver drugs for much longer time periods. One of the more familiar systems, the contraceptive Norplant, was approved in the United States in 1991 and is now in use in more than 50 countries around the world. N
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