Surgery is an important treatment for cancer; however, local recurrence following macroscopically-complete resection is common and a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. Systemic chemotherapy is often employed as an adjuvant therapy to prevent recurrence of residual disease, but has limited efficacy due to poor penetration and dose-limiting off-target toxicities. Selective delivery of chemotherapeutics to the surgical bed may eliminate residual tumor cells while avoiding systemic toxicity. While this is challenging for traditional drug delivery technologies, we utilized advances in 3D printing and drug delivery science to engineer a drug-loaded arrowhead array device (AAD) to overcome these challenges.
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