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CHAPTER 6

Magnetic drug targeting

6.1 Introduction
Magnetic drug targeting (MDT) is one of the promising methods aimed to target the
delivery of the medication needed to more efficiently treat locoregional malignancies
and to enhance the healing process for solid tumors, infections, blood coagula, and
similar diseases while minimizing the negative side effects (Plavins and Lauva, 1993;
Saiyed et al., 2003; Alexiou et al., 2006a; Shapiro et al., 2014). In MDT cancer ther-
apy, magnetic (superparamagnetic) nanoparticles (MNPs) carrying anticancer agents,
for example, chemotherapeutic, radionuclide, cancer, or gene-specific antibodies
(Dobre, 2012) are administered into the bloodstream to be delivered to the region of
interest (ROI), where they are noninvasively guided, squarely aggregated, and retained
using an external magnetic field (Gupta and Hung, 1989; Kaminski et al., 2003;
Shamsia et al., 2018).
MDT acts also as a complementary intervention for standard chemotherapy as it
has the advantage to reduce the aggressive side effects (Thomas et al., 2013). In
another circumstance, MD may be injected into articular cavities, where an external
magnetic field helps increasing its retention time at that joint level (Manea et al.,
2014; Stanciu, 2016).
Researchers have long focused on a method of concentrating significant amounts of
toxic drugs within the area of the diseased tissue with a very small amount being absorbed
into the surrounding healthy tissue (Gupta and Hung, 1989; Orekhova et al., 1990;
Papisov et al., 1987; Kaminski et al., 2003). Thus the first MDT attempts on patients used
a ferrofluid with particles (100 nm in size) constructed to chemically bind a chemothera-
peutic drug, for example, the epidoxorubicin (Lübbe et al., 1996). Later on, different types
of ferrofluids available on the market were tested and the iron oxide core was coated with
a polymer layer of starch, to provide for biocompatibility (Xu et al., 2005; Kheirkhah
et al., 2008; Price et al., 2017; Lima et al., 2019). For instance, mitoxantrone was successfully
linked to phosphate groups of starch derivatives, with which female specimens of New
Zealand rabbits were inoculated at the medial level of the left arm with squamous cell car-
cinoma. The tumor completely disappeared after 35 days of treatment, and no metastasis
or side effects were observed (Alexiou et al., 2006b).
MDT therapy begins by binding the drug to ferrofluid nanoparticles by chemical
methods or by incorporating them into a carrier drug particle (Gupta and Hung,
1989; Kaminski et al., 2003; McBride et al., 2013; Abd Elrahman and Mansour,

Computational Modeling in Biomedical Engineering and Medical Physics r 2021 Elsevier Inc.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-817897-3.00006-3 All rights reserved. 171