Matthew Bacchetta, MD, and colleagues from the Department of Medicine and Columbia Engineering have developed a new method to deliver very small volumes of drugs into the lung. Their approach, which instills micro-liters of drug-infused liquid into the lung, could provide much more effective treatment of lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis, bronchopneumonia, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and lung cancer. This innovative approach provides a potentially powerful alternative to traditional methods of drug delivery by delivering accurate doses of medication to their target and by preventing drugs from adversely affecting other organs in the body. The team’s paper, Targeted delivery of liquid microvolumes into the lung, was published in the August 31, 2015 online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
