Convection-enhanced delivery of therapeutics for hard-to-reach brain tumours

Project ID: 2531bd1701

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Research Area(s): chemistry
engineering
materials

Project Summary:

Convection-enhanced delivery (CED) is a targeted drug delivery technique used primarily in the brain to treat neurological disorders and malignancies (Parvar et al, 2025). By using a pressure gradient, CED allows therapeutic agents to bypass the blood-brain barrier, achieving high local concentrations directly at the treatment site, enhancing efficacy, and minimising systemic side effects. While promising, CED faces several limitations, including difficulty in precisely controlling drug distribution and concentration as well limited duration of therapeutic effect due to drug dispersing into brain tissue. One way to overcome these challenges is to formulate CED infusates into long-acting micro-and nanoparticles capable of targeting and attacking affected cells, while minimising impact on the surrounding healthy tissue.

This project will therefore explore the feasibility of using advanced formulation technologies to enhance outcomes in CED.

For the initial proof-of-concept work, we will use computational model (digital twin) of human brain in combination with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate how infusates consisting of various drugs and excipients – having different molecular diffusivity, driving pressure gradient, etc. – affect the distribution of drug substance in brain tissue.

Our preliminary therapeutic target will be diffuse midline glioma, an aggressive and rare form of paediatric cancer. The student will then fabricate long-acting polymeric microparticles loaded with drugs and characterise them using physicochemical methods (SEM, TEM, XRD, DSC, TGA) before testing their drug release kinetics in a brain tissue phantom of the CED procedure. If successful, further tests will be performed on ex vivo brain tissue. The project will involve a combination of artificial intelligence, materials science, engineering, chemistry and biology, closely working with clinicians from Great Ormond Street Hospital to accelerate progression into the clinic.