Lately, I've been researching about the use of Chitosan Hydrogels in Cancer treatment and its use with antibodies. I noticed that the mention of this gels is not as frequent and the application for cancer treatment is not as popular as I would have thought. Does anyone know if there is a practical reason for this? I know that right now the use of nanoparticles much more popular but I'd like to know if there is a problem with therapies that use Chitosan Hydrogels.
Dear Héctor Osorio-Vega ,
In my opinion, chitosan tends to have lot of batch variations (species to species, same species caught at different locations and at different seasons, processing methods etc) which is one of the limiting factors to be used for precise applications such as cancer targeting.
Another issue is that, as far as I know, chitosan is not approved by FDA for internal applications (although its approved for use as bandages and hemostatic applications).
Furthermore, there are people who might develop allergic responses to chitin/chitosan based products, which further reduces the interest.
Although there are these many practical issues to overcome, I worked in lab, where they have developed lot of chitosan/chitosan nanoparticle (also chemically modified chitosans) based anti-cancer drug delivery systems (but mostly nanoparticles), which are effective atleast at the level of animal studies.
But I have seen few labs, using chitosan injectable hydrogels for anti-cancer treatments..
Good luck.
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