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Your brain lives in a bubble—specifically, a protective web of about 400 miles of special blood vessels that bar toxins, bacteria, and other alien invaders from passing from your blood to your crucial headspace. Without the barrier, we wouldn’t live long.
But when your brain is sick, that’s a problem: the so-called blood-brain barrier also denies entry to potentially brain-saving or life-saving therapeutic drugs.
Now an international team of scientists has figured out a way to drop that barrier for a couple of hours, long enough to let beneficial treatments into that sequestered region.
Members of the group looked at a protein called Claudin5, which keeps the barrier’s blood vessel cells locked tightly together.
They discovered that when a binder molecule known as Netrin-1 was genetically engineered out of adult mice with normal blood-brain barriers, the mice made less Claudin5 and the barrier weakened.
Knowing that, the researchers designed a new molecule that kept Netrin-1 from binding where it needed to among blood vessels protecting the brain. By injecting a small amount of their designer molecule into a mouse’s brain, Netrin-1 was blocked for a couple of hours, the blood-brain barrier opened, and drugs or other therapeutic compounds could reach their targets.
The scientists are testing their new molecule on other areas of the central nervous system.
TRENDPOST: Unlocking the blood-brain barrier will eventually make it possible to treat brain tumors more directly and effectively, and also could literally open the door to new treatments for a range of brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.