FLICKR, JON OLAV EIKENESThe key to breaching the last great biochemical barricade in the body—the blood-brain barrier, a tightly packed layer of cells critical for keeping pathogens and toxins out of the central nervous system—was sound. A team at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto injected a chemotherapy drug along with tiny gas bubbles into the bloodstream of a patient, then trained ultrasound waves on her skull, causing the bubbles to expand and contract at a rate of about 200,000 times a second and punch temporary holes in the endothelial cell layer of the blood-brain barrier, Focused Ultrasound Foundation announced this week (November 9).
“Opening the barrier is really of huge importance. It is probably the major limitation for innovative drug development for neurosciences,” Bart De Strooper, codirector of the Leuven Institute for Neuroscience and Disease in Belgium, told New Scientist.
The patient, 56-year-old Bonny Hall, has suffered a brain tumor for the past eight years. While it had been kept under control with various medications, earlier this year it started to grow. The experimental treatment allowed the chemotherapy agent to be delivered directly to her tumor. An MRI scan confirmed that the technique worked in opening the blood-brain barrier, and the researchers will now examine Hall’s tumor, which was removed surgically the day after the therapy, to determine just how much of the drug penetrated. Hall told BBC ...
