Doctors test saliva-resistant bandage to treat pre-cancerous lesions in mouth
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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – COLUMBUS, Ohio) – The statistics can be a little hard to swallow – on average a thousand times a day, every day, someone is diagnosed with a pre-cancerous lesion in their mouth. Unfortunately, right now, these patients only have two options to deal with them: they can choose to do nothing, have their dentists keep a close eye on the lesions and hope they don’t become cancerous, or they can have the sores cut out and biopsied to know for sure.
Neither option is ideal. Waiting and watching often takes an emotional toll on patients, and cutting the lesions out has it’s drawbacks as well.
“Surgery carries with it some post-operative limitations and issues with quality of life” said Dr. Peter Larsen, DDS at Ohio State University. “There are also issues with the patients’ diets, their ability to speak and, of course, post-operative pain” he said.
Hoping to avoid both of those scenarios, Eva Sue Reed looked for a third option. So, she volunteered to help test an experimental gel that she simply slathered onto the sores in her mouth. But soon the limitations with that approach became evident as well.
“I put it on my gums and after just a short time, you know, maybe 5 minutes or so, it started to kind of dissolve in my mouth and you didn’t even see it after just a few minutes” said Reed. “It just wasn’t going away.”
Now, researchers at Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center have helped to develop what could be a potent new option – a “saliva-proof” bandage specifically designed to stick to the inside of the mouth.*
On that bandage is a powerful dose of medicine made from high concentrations of a man-made vitamin A. Researchers say not only might the compound be a potent cancer-fighter, but studies show the bandage delivered the drug directly into the sores with 97% efficiency.* The medicine was delivered directly into the sore, and that’s where it stayed.
“Actually, we’d like to see a minimal amount of compound released into the blood stream, and, in fact, that was the case” said Dr. Susan Mallery, DDS, a dentist and leader of the study at Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. “We really got therapeutic levels with this patch, without any systemic problems” she said.
That’s important, because earlier studies using a pill form of the medication were promising, but ultimately discontinued. “At high levels, it’s toxic” explained Dr. Mallery. Patients who took the pill form “develop trouble with sores in their mouth, had changes in liver profile and developed dry skin” she said.
But in lab tests, this patch alleviated those problems.* “The idea behind a patch would be that it would hold in place, much like a nicotine patch or some type of other drug-delivery patch that people might be familiar with” said Dr. Larsen. “It allows us to deliver a fairly small and safe concentration of the drug, without impacting the rest of the body.”
Experts say of the 300,000 mouth lesions that are diagnosed each year, 10-15% develop into oral cancer.
If this patch works as efficiently in humans as it did in lab tests, doctors may finally have a new option in treating them, one that spares patients both the despair of waiting and watching and the pain from cutting the sores out.
*Development and In Vitro-In Vivo Evaluation of Fenretinide-Loaded Oral Mucoadhesive Patches for Site-Specific Chemoprevention of Oral Cancer, Pharmaceutical Research. Published online June 15, 2011 at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/h54g2w4835031l5x/
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