OBJECTIVE Up to 90% of patients with advanced cancer experience intractable pain. For these patients, oral analgesics are the mainstay of therapy, often augmented with intrathecal drug delivery. Neurosurgical ablative procedures have become less commonly used, though their efficacy has been well-established. Unfortunately, little is known about the safety of ablation in the context of previous ...

a great challenge in using natural polysaccharide as drug delivery system is their fast drug release. the purpose of the present study was to prepare and evaluate chitosan oligosaccharide (cho)-de-estrifiedtragacanth (det) core-shell nanoparticles for controled release of water soluble drugs. cho-det nanoparticles were prepared by microemulsion method and characterized by ft-ir spectroscopy. si...

microspheres formulated from poly (d,l-lactic-co-glycolide) (plga), a biodegradable polymer, have been extensively evaluated as a drug delivery system. in this study, the preparation, characterization and drug release properties of the plga microspheres were evaluated. simvastatin (sim)-loaded plga microspheres were prepared by oil-in-water emulsion/solvent evaporation method. the microspheres ...

Major traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) results in permanent paralysis below the site of injury. The effectiveness of systemically delivered pharmacological therapies against SCI can be limited by the blood-spinal cord barrier and side effects. Local drug delivery to the injured spinal cord can be achieved using a minimally invasive biopolymer matrix of hyaluronan and methylcellulose injected ...

Amorphous mesoporous silica nanoparticles ('protocells') that support surface lipid bilayers recently characterized in vitro as carrier constructs for small drug and DNA delivery are reported here as highly biocompatible both in vitro and in vivo, involving the brain and spinal cord following spinal delivery into the lumbosacral subarachnoid space (intrathecal; i.t.). Specifically, positively c...

BACKGROUND Intrathecal drug infusion therapy is usually considered when spinal-acting analgesics or antispasmodics administered via the oral or transdermal routes fail to control patients' pain or are associated with unacceptable side effects. The intrathecal administration of centrally acting agents bypasses the blood-brain-barrier resulting in much higher cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentrati...