Researchers who used ultrasound to break through the blood-brain barrier have paved the way for more effective and tailored Alzheimer’s therapies.
The researchers at QIMR Berghofer in Brisbane spent five years honing the procedure in their lab using specially produced stem cell models, proving that even large-molecule medications may be pushed through what was once a shut door in the body.
The blood-brain barrier is a protective group of cells that exists to prevent infections in other parts of the body from reaching the brain, but it also stops 98 per cent of medicines from crossing over.
That is a big issue when trying to treat conditions of the brain, including Alzheimer’s, which causes plaque to build up in the brain, breaking up the natural connections between neurons.
QIMR stem cell researcher Dr Lotta Oikari said they used a focused ultrasound technique on stem cell models cultivated in the lab from Alzheimer’s patients.
“We were able to use this focused ultrasound technology to open the blood-brain cell model we had developed to deliver two therapeutic Alzheimer’s antibodies into our brain cell model,” she said.
“This is really exciting because we’ve shown we can increase drug delivery into the brain, which will potentially improve drug efficiency.”
Associate Professor Anthony White, the head of the QIMR lab that developed the technique, has a close connection to the research, as his mother died from Alzheimer’s 15 years ago.
“I was working on Alzheimer’s at the time, and I couldn’t offer her or my father, who was caring for her, any options to slow the disease down,” he said.
“But now it’s a much more exciting time, and we’ll start to see some breakthroughs for people with dementia in the future.”
Researchers at the Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) had previously used the focused ultrasound technique combined with microbubbles to cross the blood-brain barrier in animal models.
The QIMR researchers used individual stem cell cultures from Alzheimer’s patients engineered to mimic the human blood-brain barrier to test their method.
Oikari said that meant the cell models reflected variations of Alzheimer’s between individual patients.
