Exploring Drug Delivery to the Peritoneum

The Peritoneal cavity (PC) is key metastatic site for intra-abdominal malignancies (e.g. GI tract and rectal cancer). PC site can be used to target several other diseases where lymphatic drug delivery is desired without dumping large amount of drug. Till recently, it was thought that treatment with curative intent was impossible but that was challenged by the introduction of cytoreductive surgery (CRS) and heated intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) and PIPAC (pressurized intraperitoneal aerosol chemotherapy). Recently, a growing number of preclinical and clinical studies advocate intraperitoneal (IP) chemotherapy as an alternative post-operative therapy cancer. Although their effectiveness has been proven both experimentally and clinically, there is still little understanding on role of drug delivery systems (DDS) for targeting drugs to IP cavity. Nevertheless, IP chemotherapy has not yet been adopted widely in practice for the ovarian cancer treatment, and there are several challenges in IP drug delivery.There are two main challenges one posed by IP cavity where the residence time of a small molecular weight drug (