New Therapy Found to Treat Brain Disease
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
An international team of scientists has found a way of bypassing the brain's protective structure, called the brain-blood barrier (BBB), a breakthrough in dealing with neuronal diseases such as Alzheimer's.
The team said Sunday that the findings will open a new potential line of noninvasive treatment for brain-related disease _ delivering drugs into the brain.
``Thus far, it was impossible to get any drug into the brain because of the BBB,'' said Prof. Lee Sang-kyung at Hanyang University, who joined the project.
``But we used a RNA-protein complex to make therapeutic agents permeate through the BBB to travel to the brain. Experiments in mice have showed it works,'' the 38-year-old said.
Lee and his associates tried to cure mice infected with a fatal form of brain inflammation with the new method and up to 80 percent of treated animals survived while all of the non-treated ones died.
They expect the procedure to be effective in humans although much follow-up research is necessary.
The BBB refers to a protective membrane, which prevents some substances such as toxic chemicals in the blood from entering brain tissue.
It acts primarily to shield the brain from harmful substances, which otherwise may taint the central nervous system.
Yet, it bars therapeutic molecules from making it into the brain at the same time, which was a major impediment in the treatment of neurological diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
In other words, there was no way to deliver sufficient therapeutic agents to the central nervous system due to the BBB.
Lee said a U.S. company already started developing a medicine, which employed the newfound method, and expects clinical tests will be launched in the not-so-distant future.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School and Hanyang University participated in the study, which will be featured by the illustrious peer-reviewed journal Nature.