Chemotherapy drugs broke the blood-brain barrier for the first time

YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 10, ARMENPRESS. The blood-brain barrier, a highly selective film of cells that stops dangerous neurotoxins and life-saving cancer drugs alike from entering the brain, just had its Pioneer 10 moment.

“Armenpress” reports citing Motherboard that for the first time, doctors at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital used ultrasound waves to successfully deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to the affected part of the brain through the blood-brain barrier in an experimental surgery.

If the technique is determined to be safe and replicable, doctors will soon be sending drugs to treat diseases that affect the brain straight to where they’ll be most effective, instead of applying a big dose to the body and hoping it works.

“By using a focused ultrasound technique, you can apply chemotherapy directly to a lesion,” Allison Bethune, Sunnybrooke’s clinical research coordinator for neurosurgery, told me over the phone. “With traditional chemotherapy, you have to apply a large dose that wreaks havoc on the body. This opens the doors to more treatments for other diseases with a similar technique.”

The successful surgery is no doubt a first step down a very long road, but one that, at least, we are finally marching down. Decades from now, if the science pans out, nanobots could enter our blood streams and deliver smart drugs to our brains once we let them through by firing ultrasound waves at our heads.