Would this help us get drugs to the brain if we ever get some useful ones created for stroke?
http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=146701&CultureCode=en
A new technology that may assist in the treatment of brain cancer
and other neurological diseases is the subject of an article in a
recent issue of the journal Technology, published by World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S2339547814500186.
According to the authors, the current medical use of chemotherapy to
treat brain cancer can be inefficient because of the
blood-brain-barrier that impedes the delivery of drugs out of blood
vessels and into the tumor.
The researchers from the Virginia Tech – Wake Forest University
School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences described in their
article that they have created “a tool for blood-barrier-brain
disruption that uses bursts of sub-microsecond bipolar pulses to
enhance the transfer of large molecules to the brain.”
The members of the biomedical school are: Rafael V. Davalos,
associate professor of biomedical engineering; John H. Rossmeisl Jr.,
of the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine;
Christopher Arena, Paulo A. Garcia, and Michael B. Sano of the
Bioelectromechanical Systems Laboratory; and John D. Olson of the Center
for Biomolecular Imaging . Garcia is also employed by the Laboratory
for Energy and Microsystems innovation at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology. Arena holds a second appointment with the Laboratory for
Ultrasound Contract Agent Research at the University of North Carolina
– North Carolina State University, Joint Department of Biomedical
Engineering.
The new tool is called Vascular Enabled Nanosecond pulse or VEIN
pulse. It will “reversibly open the blood-brain-barrier to facilitate
the treatment of brain cancer,” Davalos explained.
“The sub-lethal nature of these electrical bursts indicates that the
VEIN pulse may be useful for treating other neurological disorders
such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and Alzheimer’s disease,”
Davalos added.
In their testing, the VEIN pulse treatments were administered using
minimally invasive electrodes inserted into the skull of each of the 18
anesthetized male rats. They varied the pulse duration within a burst,
the total number of bursts (90 to 900), and the applied field. A key
element of their success was that the pulses alternated in polarity to
help eliminate muscle contractions and the need for a neuromuscular
blockade.
The research was supported by the Golfers Against Cancer, the Center
for Biomolecular Imaging in the Wake Forest School of Medicine, a
National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, and an NSF I-Corps
Award.
The next step in this research would be to move to large animal, pre-clinical trials.
Davalos
has been using electrical impulses in his biomedical research since
his days as a graduate student at the University of California –
Berkeley. More recently, in a February 2011 article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology,
Davalos, Gacia and Rossmeisl were among the authors who described a
successful use of irreversible electroporation to achieve complete
remission and improved quality of life in a seven-year old Labrador
retriever with a large and complex tumor.
No comments:
Post a Comment