Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
NUS Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering Research Project Write-up Title of Project : Hydrogels as drug delivery systems for treatment of bladder carcinoma Name of Supervisor : Professor Paul C. Ho Contact Details: Tel. 65162651; email. [email protected] Short Description Bladder carcinoma is the second commonest urological carcinoma after prostate cancer. In US, there are 72,570 new cases of bladder cancer in 2013 and causing 15.210 deaths (http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/types/bladder). In China, there is an increasing trend in the incidence of bladder cancer from 6.39 to 7.66 per 100,000 or 0.62% per year during the period from 1973 to 2005 according to the data from the Shanghai Cancer Registry. According to the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC), the disease recurrence rates for non-muscle invasive bladder cancer range from 15 to 61 % at one year, increasing to 31-78% at five years. The gold standard treatment for bladder carcinoma is employing intravesical delivery of mitomycin, followed by maintenance therapy with intravesical BCG or with combined intravesical BCG and mitomycin. Nevertheless, with whatever standard treatment today, the recurrence rate is still high, causing significant impact on morbidity, mortality and healthcare costs. There are a number of novel delivery systems of mitomycin and BCG reported in literatures. They were developed with objective to sustain the effects and reduce the recurrence rates. We propose in this study to advance the treatment of bladder carcinoma in two ways by: 1) identifying novel treatment or treatment combination from the existing drugs; and 2) developing novel drug delivery systems for the identified new treatment approaches. For the latter proposal, mucoadhesive hydrogels would be our option of delivery systems for therapeutics for the treatment of bladder carcinoma.