Scientists find new method of delivering Alzheimer’s drugs directly into brain

Scientists have found a new way to deliver Alzheimer’s drugs directly to the brain, sparking hopes that more effective treatment could be made available to sufferers.

Efforts to treat the disease have been hampered over the last 50 years by the difficulty of administering drugs to the brain to slow or halt its progression.

But a team of University of Oxford researchers has successfully switched off a gene implicated in Alzheimer’s in the brains of mice by exploiting tiny particles naturally released by cells, called exosomes. The exosomes, injected into the blood, are able to carry a drug across the normally impermeable blood-brain barrier to the brain where it is needed.

It is hoped that the method, if successfully tested in humans, could resolve the difficulty in administering potential new drugs for many neurological diseases including Parkinson’s, motor neurone disease and muscular dystrophy.

But the researchers cautioned that although the results were significant and promising, a number of steps must be taken before this form of drug delivery can be tested in humans. Lead scientist Matthew Wood of Oxford’s Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics said: “These are dramatic and exciting results. It’s the first time new ‘biological’ medicines have been delivered effectively across the blood-brain-barrier to the brain. This is the first time this natural system has been exploited for drug delivery.”

Over the years, many drugs have been developed to target specific parts of the disease pathways. But while these have shown good results in the lab, getting them to the right part of the body to see any effect in humans has often proved problematic.