Tailoring drugs for maximum effect and minimum side effects

Professor Dr. Mona Mohamed Ahmed Abdel-Mottaleb is a Professor of Pharmacy at Ain Shams University, Cairo. Since August she has been in Tübingen on the Humboldt Research Fellowship Program for experienced researchers. Her project is called „Exploring novel treatment modalities for chemotherapy induced alopecia using nanoparticles.“ She is hosted by Prof. Dr. Dominique J. Lunter of the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Mona Mohamed Ahmed Abdel-Mottaleb is passionate about the art of drug formulation.  Pharmacists can prepare drugs in different forms, tailoring them for maximum effect. „It was fascinating to me – using this formulation science to solve a lot of problems. Some drugs would never be effective if taken orally. You could work to make them transdermal, or deliverable nasally or by injection. It was really improving patients’ lives,“ she says.

Abdel-Mottaleb specializes in transdermal and topical products. Both of these are applied to the skin, but they work in different ways: Transdermal products penetrate the skin barrier to deliver drugs into circulation or deeper tissues, whereas topical products affect only the skin, which they minimally penetrate. Abdel-Mottaleb’s 2011 PhD thesis, carried out at Bonn University, was titled ‘Nanoscale Drug Carriers for Topical Cutaneous Therapy.’ „My PhD was mainly concerned with dermatitis, with the skin inflammation, and how to improve the efficacy of the drugs by using them topically,“ she says. Since then, she has been exploring new ways to deliver treatments via the skin. The benefits are clear: „If you take the drug topically, most probably it’s going to affect only that area. You don’t have the side effects of the drug on the other parts of the body. My new project is about this. It’s just the disease is different – it’s about chemotherapy-induced alopecia.“

Alopecia or hair loss is a major side effect of chemotherapy. Abdel-Mottaleb is looking for ways to help patients by preventing it without adding to the stress on the patient’s body:  „The cancer patient is already suffering from a lot of drugs that are taken orally and by injection, so if I can help them to improve these side effects by a topical method, that is going to be fantastic,“ she says. In her Tübingen project, Abdel-Mottaleb will seek to develop an ointment which can be applied before the start of chemotherapy so that the hair does not fall out. „It is important for reducing the psychological burden because many patients – especially the women and children – suffer under these side effects,” Abdel-Mottaleb says. „Everybody can see it. They even lose their eyebrows. This adds to the patient’s psychological burden.“

Another option is making changes to the chemotherapy drugs themselves, although Abdel-Mottaleb stresses that this is a less effective method for preventing side effects such as hair loss: „Most of my projects are based on the use of nanotechnology for drug delivery. Using nanoparticles you can also increase the targeting efficacy of the drugs. You can play with the size. You make the drug in a special size that can only go to the cancer cells without diffusion into or retention in the healthy tissue. This is a successful strategy, with some products now on the market – doxil for example. It’s a liposomal cytotoxic drug. Liposomes are a certain type of nanoparticles whose size can be controlled. And by controlling the size, you can control the target tissue. You can accumulate a high percentage of the drug into the cancer tissue with minimum exposure of the healthy parts of the body. This minimizes the side effects. We cannot say it eliminates them, but it is better.“

Professor Abdel-Mottaleb and Professor Lunter both specialize in dermal and transdermal products. „This is an interesting project for both of us. Professor Lunter was very responsive,“ Abdel-Mottaleb says. Their good rapport led to a successful application for the Humboldt Fellowship. Arriving in Tübingen in the middle of the summer holidays, Abdel-Mottaleb found helpful colleagues and PhD students. „We also had a lot of scientific discussions because luckily they didn’t have teaching duties then,“ she laughs.

After a lifetime in a big city like Cairo, it was a surprise to be in a relatively small city like Tübingen. „The Welcome Center were very helpful in providing information and directions“, Abdel-Mottaleb says, „I felt I knew my way around.“

Amanda Crain