Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s would be two neurodegenerative diseases that could be treated in the future with drugs that are moved through the blood-brain barrier with ultrasound, Bethune added. But researchers have now non-invasively breached the barrier for the first time in a human subject, delivering chemotherapy drugs to a brain cancer patient with a high level of precision and paving the way for improved treatments and fewer side effects for sufferers of neurological disorders.
Advertisement
The blood-brain barrier has always been an obstacle for doctors trying to treat brain diseases.
While the blood-brain barrier is created to protect our brains – lining the brain’s blood vessels to prevent toxic substances in the bloodstream from getting through – it’s also served as somewhat of a brick wall for modern medicine.
The barrier makes it hard for life-saving drugs to pass through into the brain cells.
Testing, carried out on animals, has yielded good results. The results of the experiment was great in lab rats, and is now being tested on human patients – with Bonny Hall being the first human patient to undergo this test.
Hall discovered her brain tumour eight years ago, though doctors at the time found it was benign.
Though she was very startled by the news, she is now looking forward to being part of this new study.
Although the tumour caused no pain, Hall experienced what she described as “little blips”, or small 10- to 20-second seizures during which she would feel “spaced out”.
Dr. Todd Mainprize, lead researcher of the Sunnybrook study, said that even though chemotherapy can be used to treat the remaining cancer cells following the surgical removal of the glioma, only 25 percent of the medication actually reaches the patient’s brain.
“Frankly speaking, our ability to treat this type of tumour, glioma, is not so good”, he told CTV News. “…Between 1940 and 2005, there has been very little progress in improving the outcome of these patients”.
The first part of the procedure involves giving the patient chemotherapy treatment. He is then injected with harmless gas microbubbles which gets directly into his bloodstream.
Using MRI-guided low intensity sound waves, the team targeted blood vessels in the blood-brain barrier near the site of the tumour and used ultrasound waves to vibrate the microbubbles, which in turn loosened the tight cell junctions that hold the blood-brain barrier together. To ensure it worked, the chemotherapy drug was marked with a chemical tag to make it visible on MRI scans.
Mainprize said the procedure went exactly as they had hoped.
While the current trial is a first-in-human achievement, Dr. Kullervo Hynynen, senior scientist at the Sunnybrook Research Institute, has been performing similar pre-clinical studies for about a decade.
“It will revolutionize the way we treat brain disease completely”. The research team will now analyze the tissue to determine the concentration of chemotherapy medication that got in.
If the technique is determined to be safe and replicable, doctors will soon be sending drugs to treat diseases that affect the brain straight to where they’ll be most effective, instead of applying a big dose to the body and hoping it works.
The procedure, which took place earlier in the week according to CTV News, was used to successfully treat Bonny Hall’s brain tumor by non-invasively delivering medication deep into the brain using microbubbles and focused ultrasound to force cancer medication through the blood-brain barrier.
Mainprize says the method could be used for all sorts of brain conditions besides cancer.
Advertisement
“My hope is that I can just be a normal mom, a normal grandma”, she says.
