Blog

May 3, 2023

Chemotherapy drug reaches brain in humans for first time

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KSDhqhKL-JQ

A major impediment to treating the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma has been that the most potent chemotherapy can’t permeate the blood-brain barrier to reach the aggressive brain tumor.

But now Northwestern Medicine scientists report results of the first in-human clinical trial in which they used a novel, skull-implantable ultrasound device to open the and repeatedly permeate large, critical regions of the to deliver chemotherapy that was injected intravenously.

The four-minute procedure to open the blood-brain barrier is performed with the patient awake, and patients go home after a few hours. The results show the treatment is safe and well tolerated, with some patients getting up to six cycles of treatment.

Comments are closed.