The Limitations of Current Chemotherapy

2 August 2026

Chemotherapy has been an essential part of cancer treatment for decades. It has helped millions of patients and remains an important treatment option for many types of cancer.

Yet chemotherapy also faces a fundamental challenge: the treatment does not only reach the tumor.

Most conventional chemotherapy is administered systemically, meaning that the drug travels through the bloodstream and circulates throughout the body. While the goal is to destroy cancer cells, healthy tissues can also be exposed to the drug.

This is one of the reasons why finding better ways to deliver cancer treatment remains an important area of medical research.

How does traditional chemotherapy work?

Many chemotherapy drugs work by targeting cells that divide rapidly. Cancer cells often divide and multiply quickly, making them particularly vulnerable to these treatments.

However, cancer cells are not the only rapidly dividing cells in the body.

Healthy cells in tissues such as the digestive tract, bone marrow and hair follicles can also divide rapidly. As a result, chemotherapy can affect these healthy tissues alongside the tumor, deprive the patient of nutrients and energy, and impair the immune system.

Depending on the specific drug and treatment regimen, this can contribute to side effects such as fatigue, nausea, hair loss and vulnerability for multiple infections.

These side effects can make treatment difficult for patients and may limit how much of a drug can safely be administered. In the more harsher treatment regimes, many  especially elderly patients stop the treatment pre-maturely as they cannot handle the side-effects.

The drug delivery challenge

There is another important limitation to systemic chemotherapy.

When a drug is administered through an infusion or taken as a pill, it must travel through the body before reaching the tumor. Only a small proportion of the administered drug may ultimately reach the tumor tissue.

At the same time, other organs and tissues are exposed to the drug.

This creates a difficult balance for oncologists: how can enough drug reach the tumor to have a therapeutic effect without exposing the rest of the body to unnecessarily high levels?

Increasing the dose may increase the amount of drug reaching the tumor, but it also increases exposure elsewhere in the body and potentially increase toxicity.

This is particularly challenging when treating aggressive or difficult-to-reach solid tumors.

What if the treatment could be delivered directly into the tumor?

Localized drug delivery offers a different approach.

Instead of relying entirely on the bloodstream to transport a drug to the tumor, a localized treatment can be delivered directly to the tumor site.

The objective is straightforward: concentrate the treatment where it is needed most.

For tumors that can be accessed using a needle, catheter or endoscope, this creates an opportunity to place a drug directly inside the tumor.

However, simply injecting a drug into a tumor is not necessarily enough. A liquid formulation can disperse away from the injection site, potentially limiting how long the drug remains where it is needed.

This is where drug-delivery technology becomes particularly important.

Creating a localized drug depot

OncoLize is developing the ChemoGell™ platform to address this challenge.

ChemoGell™ is a thermo-responsive hydrogel based on bio-erodible polymers. It is injected as a liquid formulation and rapidly forms a localized depot inside the tumor.

The depot can then remain at the injection site and gradually release the loaded oncology drug over time.

Instead of delivering a drug into the bloodstream and allowing it to circulate throughout the body, the objective is to create a local reservoir of treatment directly inside the tumor.

This could allow a high concentration of the drug to be maintained at the target site while reducing unnecessary exposure elsewhere in the body.

Using established drugs in a new way

An important part of the OncoLize approach is that the platform can be combined with established oncology drugs.

Drugs such as Gemcitabine, Paclitaxel and Cis-Platinum are already well known in cancer treatment. The innovation lies not necessarily in creating a completely new drug, but in exploring whether existing drugs can be delivered in a different way.

By combining established drugs with a localized delivery platform, OncoLize aims to investigate whether the therapeutic effect can be concentrated at the tumor while reducing systemic exposure.

Preclinical research with the ChemoGell™ platform has shown promising results, including studies involving pancreatic cancer.

Why pancreatic cancer?

Pancreatic cancer is one of the areas where the limitations of current treatment approaches are particularly significant.

The disease is often difficult to detect early and is challenging to treat. By the time pancreatic cancer is diagnosed, the tumor may already be advanced or difficult to remove surgically. In addition, pancreatic cancers develop a thick layer of fibrous tissue around the tumor mass. This layer effectively shields the tumor from the rest of the body and significantly reduces blood-flow through these tumors. That is why systemic dosing of any kind of drug through blood or lymph fluid is rather in-effective in these tumors and requires very high levels of drug dosing, often with severe toxic side effects as well. Finally, direct injections of any kind of liquid will be pushed out through the needle track, as these tumors build up internal pressure over time.

OncoLize has therefore selected pancreatic cancer as its primary focus for the development of its localized drug-delivery technology.

In preclinical studies conducted in collaboration with Leiden University Medical Center, a ChemoGell™ formulation containing Gemcitabine was tested in a pancreatic tumor model.

The study demonstrated growth arrest and 100% survival in the specific model studied, with no observed adverse effects. While these results are encouraging, further research and clinical studies are needed to determine whether similar benefits can be achieved in humans.

From systemic treatment to localized treatment

Localized drug delivery is not necessarily about replacing chemotherapy.

Instead, it is about exploring whether where a drug is delivered can be just as important as which drug is used.

A localized drug depot could potentially be combined with existing cancer treatments, used before or after surgery, or incorporated into combination treatment strategies.

The broader goal is to develop treatment approaches that can deliver a greater therapeutic effect at the tumor while minimizing unnecessary exposure to healthy tissues.

The future of chemotherapy may also be about delivery

Cancer treatment continues to evolve. New drugs, immunotherapies and targeted treatments are expanding the options available to patients.

At the same time, improving drug delivery remains an important part of the equation.

For OncoLize, the idea is simple: rather than accepting that a cancer drug must circulate throughout the entire body to reach a tumor, why not investigate ways to bring the treatment directly to the tumor?

Through its ChemoGell™ platform, OncoLize is working towards a localized approach to cancer treatment that could potentially deliver more drug where it is needed and less where it is not.

The technology is still progressing through development, and the next steps include safety assessments, manufacturing scale-up and preparation for clinical trials.

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