Researchers develop new drug-delivery system to treat brain disorders

A study led by researchers of Brigham and Women's Hospital claims that technology could potentially offer a variety of treatments for human neurological disorders.

- 

In the past few decades, a team of researchers has identified biological pathways leading to neurodegenerative diseases and developed promising molecular agents to target them. However, the translation of these findings into clinically approved treatments has progressed at a much slower rate, in part because of the challenges scientists face in delivering therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and into the brain. To facilitate successful delivery of therapeutic agents to the brain, a team of bioengineers, physicians, and collaborators at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital created a nanoparticle platform, which can facilitate therapeutically effective delivery of encapsulated agents in mice with a physically breached or intact BBB.

In a mouse model of traumatic brain injury (TBI), they observed that the delivery system showed three times more accumulation in the brain than conventional methods of delivery and was therapeutically effective as well, which could open possibilities for the treatment of numerous neurological disorders.

The findings published in Science Advances shows that previously developed approaches for delivering therapeutics into the brain after TBI rely on the short window of time after a physical injury to the head when the BBB is temporarily breached. However, after the BBB is repaired within a few weeks, physicians lack tools for effective drug delivery.