Current magnetic drug delivery therapies allow particles to be attracted to a magnet, but not concentrated toward points away from the magnet face. Clinical trials have concentrated on treatment to targets at or just below the skin surface.
University of Maryland‘s Aleksandar Nacev and Benjamin Shapiro, with Weinberg Medical Physics, have developed a non-invasive dynamic inversion technique to direct therapies and diagnostics to deep targets in the body.
Instead of surgery or chemotherapy, magnetic particles as drug carriers could allow clinicians to focus therapy on precise disease locations.
According to to WMP’s Irving Weinberg: “The Holy Grail of magnetic drug targeting is the dream of using magnets outside the body to minimally-invasively direct drug therapy to anywhere inside the body, for example, to inoperable deep tumors or to sections of the brain that have been damaged by trauma, vascular or degenerative diseases. We have shown that fast pulsing of external electromagnetic fields may be able to achieve this goal.”