Microspheres for Local Drug Delivery

About 40.000 people in The Netherlands suffer from kidney disease. When kidney function stops completely, dialysis and a kidney transplant are the only available treatment options. Because of a shortage in donor organs many patients have to depend on dialysis. However, dialysis has severe complications and remains a health threat.Within this project we have worked on a new patient friendly and affordable therapy for the treatment of kidney diseases. The therapy focusses on treating the disease in an early stage, thereby preventing the development towards chronic kidney failure.During this project we created microspheres of different polymers. With an in vitro cytotoxicity assay we could pre-select candidate microspheres which were not harmful to certain cell types. This way we reduced the number of experimental animals that is normally needed.Then we injected microspheres with different chemistry and physical characteristics on the back of a rat, and found that the diameter of the microsphere has an influence on the foreign body response.The effectiveness of microspheres with an optimal size of 30 µm was shown in two kidney disease models. We have shown that microspheres are a promising tool to deliver drugs locally and controllable in time. This local, controllable delivery of drugs leads to increased therapeutic effects combined with fewer side effects