BREAKTHROUGH! Prostate Cancer: Reformulation Of Cancer Drug Abiraterone Acetate Leads To Betters Outcomes For Prostate Cancer Patients
Source: Prostate Cancer Jun 21, 2020 4 years, 5 months, 1 day, 21 hours, 36 minutes ago
Prostate Cancer: Pre-clinical trials by the University of South Australia indicate that reformulation of the prostate cancer drug abiraterone acetate improves the drug's effectiveness by 40 per cent and dramatically improve the quality of life for individuals suffering from prostate cancer.
The research findings have been published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378517320302489?via%3Dihub
The drug enhancement was developed by Professor Dr Clive Prestidge's Nanostructure and Drug Delivery research group at University Of South Australia Cancer Research Institute, the breakthrough discovery uses an oil-based oral formulation that not only enables a smaller dose of the drug to be effective, but also has the potential to dramatically reduce possible side effects, such as joint swelling and diarrhea.
Though the existing abiraterone acetate drug is the leading formulation to treat prostate cancer, lead researcher, Dr Hayley Schultz says the new enhanced formulation will ultimately provide a better treatment for patients with prostate cancer.
Currently, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in men, with one in six at risk of diagnosis before the age of 85. Globally, prostate cancer cases reached 1.28 million in 2018.
Dr Schultz told Thailand Medical News, "Many pharmaceuticals and drugs are poorly water soluble, so when they are ingested, they enter the gut but do not dissolve, which means that their therapeutic effect is limited."
He further explained, "In the current formulation, only 10 per cent of the dose is absorbed, leaving the other 90 per cent undissolved, where it simply passes through the body as waste. On top of this, patients taking the current formulation must fast for two hours prior to taking the drug, and another hour after taking the drug to achieve predictable absorption. And as you can imagine, this can be painstakingly inconvenient.”
He continued, "Our new formulation changes this. By using oils to mimic pharmaceutical food effects, we're able to significantly increase the drug's solubilisation and absorption, making it more effective and a far less invasive treatment for patients."
The enhanced formulation uses very high levels of abiraterone acetate dissolved within a specific oil and encapsulated within porous silica microparticles to form a powder that can be made into tablets or filled into capsules. Applied to human treatment, it could reduce the dose from 1000mg to 700mg per day, without the need for fasting.
Dr Prestidge says if the team can secure funding, clinical trials in humans could be just a few months away.
He said, "Based on our knowledge of this drug's pharmaceutical food effect, we hypothesize its absorption in humans will be extensively improved using this technology. Anything we can do to contribute to the development of a commercialized product to improve the lives of patients, is invaluable. This novel f
ormulation is flexible enough to be adopted by thousands of different medicines; its potential to help patients of all kinds is exponential."
The team hopes to start clinical trials by early next year. But the new formulation is available under emergency use and also based on doctors discretion in certain other countries.
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