Sperm drugs: Women’s best bet for cancer-killing gynecological tumor treatments

spermatazoa

Delivering drugs to cancerous tissue is one of the more urgent medical issues of our time. The problems with drug delivery are many. These chemicals often become diluted in body fluids or absorbed by other organs. And even when they do reach their target, they cannot always penetrate cancerous tissue easily.

Step forward Mariana Medina-Sánchez and pals from the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences in Germany. They’ve created a unique drug delivery system that uses sperm to carry the active ingredient into a tumor. Their new approach is designed specifically for diseases of the female reproductive tract such as gynecological cancer, endometriosis, pelvic inflammatory diseases, and others.

Sperm has significant advantages over other drug delivery systems such as bacteria, which can trigger significant immune responses. And unlike bacteria, sperm cells do not proliferate to form colonies that can cause other problems. [Sperm can also] protect the drug from enzymes that can degrade it, and they do not dump their load unexpectedly….

sperm drive

[But this] raises the question of ethics—whose sperm will be used for this kind of treatment, and what of the potential for pregnancy? If these questions can be satisfactorily answered, the technique has significant potential.

[Read the original source here]

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Sperm Loaded with Drugs Could Target Gynecological Cancers

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia

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