Micropharmacology beyond Target Expression: Mapping Barriers to Intratumoral Drug Delivery.

Mapping intra-tumoral drug distribution reveals significant barriers, with variability across patients and tumor regions, limiting therapeutic success in cancer treatment.

• Why it matters: Understanding how drugs penetrate and distribute within tumors is crucial because heterogeneity and microenvironmental barriers hinder effective therapy, yet current methods do not quantify drug delivery directly.
• What they did: Lu and colleagues used highly multiplexed spatial proteomics to measure fluorescently labeled antibody therapeutics in tumor tissues from patients, analyzing cell-specific drug distribution and identifying key barriers.
• The result: Their findings highlight stromal, vascular, and cellular factors that impede drug delivery, offering a measurement approach to predict and overcome these barriers, advancing precision medicine strategies.