Deans' stroke musings: Miniaturized system delivers drugs to the brain with pinpoint accuracy

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Miniaturized system delivers drugs to the brain with pinpoint accuracy

This should easily be useable in delivering tPA. In much smaller doses leading to less bleeding risk, which seems to be the main reason its use is so low.
https://www.mdlinx.com/internal-medicine/top-medical-news/article/2018/01/31/7502017/?

Reuters Health News

A novel miniaturized system delivers sub-cubic millimeter volumes of drug into affected brain areas with pinpoint accuracy, researchers report.
"Local delivery of drugs to compartments of the brain is a feasible technical possibility and could even treat chronic conditions,” Dr. Michael J. Cima and colleagues from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, told Reuters Health in a joint email. “This remote-controlled drug delivery system would provide delivery of multiple distinctive (drugs) with minimal systemic toxicity, and decreased therapy time.”
Dr. Cima’s team describe their miniaturized neural drug delivery system, which they call MiNDS, and its use in rat and rhesus macaque monkey models in a January 24 Science Translational Medicine online report.
The device consists of an electrode (75 micrometers in diameter) and two channels within a protective aligner, all inside an etched stainless steel needle.
MiNDS delivered microliter and nanoliter quantities of drug (muscimol) into rat brain, inducing behavioral changes in a tunable, repeatable manner while simultaneously recording neuronal electroencephalogram activity.
Similar experiments in rhesus macaque monkeys confirmed the fine, localized, bidirectional control capabilities of the device.
“The customizable feature of MiNDS could open new routes to deliver not only chemicals but also light and electricity to other organs (not limited only to the brain) with pinpoint spatiotemporal resolution,” the authors said. “For instance, optogenetics of peripheral nerves together with electrical and chemical interfacing could be achieved through a single implant via a MiNDS.”
“Another potential use of MiNDS could be for targeted delivery of chemotherapeutics to tumors in the body,” they speculated. “The multimodal capabilities would allow for more in-depth investigation into the pathology of neurological conditions in vivo, as well as a novel drug exploration system for pharmaceutical research and development.”
Three of the 12 authors, including Dr. Cima, are inventors on a patent application that covers systems and methods for neural drug delivery and modulation of brain activity.
—Will Boggs, MD