A tunable and injectable local drug delivery system for personalized periodontal application

11 May 2020

The primary treatment of periodontitis option is to remove the pathogenic biofilm mechanically. However, rapid recolonization of the biofilm after debridement often induces the recurrence of periodontitis in susceptible patients. In such cases, adjunctive therapy is required, e.g. direct administration of antimicrobial, antiseptic or anti-inflammatory agents into the periodontal pocket. Unfortunately, there is no standard protocol for every patient with refractory periodontitis, due to considerable differences in disease phenotype and treatment response between patients.A solution for this problem can be found by tailoring the therapy duration and medication dosage to the requirements of the individual patient. Therefore, a controllable and tunable local delivery system has to be available in order to facilitate personalized medicine in the treatment of periodontal disease.

In the Journal of Controlled Release, Fang Yang, theme Reconstructive and regenerative medicine, and colleagues, have designed and formulated a tunable and injectable local delivery system by loading the PLGA-drug microspheres into the PIC hydrogel. This system exhibited appropriate injectability, long-term structural stability, and no obvious in vivo inflammatory response. Furthermore, the release of drugs could be controlled by adjusting the loaded mass ratio of acid- and ester- end capped PLGA microspheres.

As evidenced in these results, they envision that upon further optimization, this novel and simple thermo-responsive PLGA-PIC carrier system may have the potential to be translated as an effective therapy for penalized medicine in periodontal clinics.

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  Dentistry