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Posts Tagged ‘brain tumors’

For patients with brain tumors who don’t have a variety of option have to settle with a surgery and radiation which can damage crucial parts of the brain. It is also seen that the chemotherapy drugs don’t easily percolate through the blood-brain barrier.

An effective solution is being launched where a procedure using magnets, ultrasound and minuscule drug-coated particles may be an effective solution, published in Tuesday’s edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers, led by Dr. Kuo-Chen Wei of Chang Gung University in Taiwan, injected tiny magnetic beads called nanoparticles, coated with a chemotherapy drug, into the rats’ tails. Ultrasound was used to open up a small region of
the blood-brain barrier and a magnetic field to attract the particles to an actual location in the brain. This procedure of treating rats with brain tumors resulted in slowing the tumor growth in rats lived two-thirds longer than untreated rats.

“The technology’s not very difficult,” Wei said, “but the idea is novel.”He also added that clinical trials in human beings are at least four to five years away.

It becomes difficult to treat brain tumors to treat with traditional drug delivery methods because the brain is insulated from circulating blood. The focused ultrasound which is much stronger than the ultrasound technique used on pregnant women temporarily disrupts the barrier and also allows drugs to enter.

Once the drugs get into the brain, It should be properly allotted to the actual places to cut down on the damage to healthy tissue. This report is the first in which magnetic targeting was combined with ultrasound to attract the nanoparticles and their drug passengers to a specific part of the brain.

“The method has significant clinical potential,” said Dr. Kullervo Hynynen of the University of Toronto Medical School, who conducts similar research but was not involved in the new study.

Wei and his team are working to improve the treatment so that it can be also used on humans. He declared that first additional chemotherapy drugs and nanoparticle types had to be tried, as well as improve the ultrasound and magnetic-targeting technology. Some scientists still are under the impression that opening the blood-brain barrier to allow powerful chemicals into the brain is too dangerous on humans.

“The potential for toxicity in normal brain regions could cause all kinds of problems,” said Allan David, a drug delivery researcher at the University of Michigan. “I think it’s an interesting study, but it’s still far from clinical studies.”

Some amount of danger in opening the blood-brain barrier can be avoided by combining Wei’s approach with a type of drug that is activated only upon reaching the tumor, David said, so that healthy brain tissue is left unharmed.