Drugs breakthrough for Alzheimer's patients

Published on Sunday 20 March 2011 17:06

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 past 50 years by the difficulty of administering drugs to the brain to slow or halt its progression.

But a team of Oxford University 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 the method, if successfully tested in humans, could resolve the difficulty in administering potential new drugs for 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 had to be taken before this form of drug delivery could be tested on humans.

The Alzheimer's Society welcomed the findings but said more research was needed to see if the method would be effective for Alzheimer's sufferers.

Dr Susanne Sorensen, head of research at the charity, said: "The blood-brain barrier protects the brain from harmful chemicals but also makes it difficult for drugs to reach the target cells.

"If this delivery method proves safe in humans, then we may see more effective drugs being made available for people with Alzheimer's in the future."

The Oxford study is published in Nature Biotechnology.