Polyketals May Improve IBD Treatment

PHILADELPHIA — A family of biodegradable polymers called polyketals and their derivatives may improve treatment for inflammatory illnesses, such as inflammatory bowel disease, by delivering drugs, proteins and snips of ribonucleic acid to disease locations in the body.

The polyketal microparticles are a vehicle to get the drugs inside the body to the diseased area as quickly as possible, said Niren Murthy, assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“The major advantage to using these polyketals to deliver drugs is that they degrade into biocompatible compounds that don’t accumulate in a patient’s tissue or cause additional inflammation,” Murthy said.

Details about the polyketals and clinical applications were described during three presentations on August 18-20 at the 236th American Chemical Society National Meeting in Philadelphia. This research started in 2003 and is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

In a presentation on August 19, graduate student Scott Wilson detailed a new polyketal derivative aimed at enhancing the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, an illness that causes the large and small intestines to swell.

The new polymer has the advantage of stability in acids and bases. It degrades only in the presence of reactive oxygen species, which are present in and around inflamed tissue. Cell culture experiments have demonstrated that the microparticles degraded more rapidly in cells that overproduced superoxide, a reactive oxygen species.

The researchers are currently collaborating with Didier Merlin, a professor in the Division of Digestive Diseases at Emory University, to investigate loading these polyketals with therapeutics to treat inflammatory bowel disease.

“We think these microparticles are going to be fantastic for oral drug delivery because they can survive the stomach conditions before they release their contents in the intestines,” Murthy said.