Doctors can now inject drugs straight into people’s brains, after making a major discovery in breaking through the barrier that keeps the nervous and circulatory systems apart.
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) keeps us safe by ensuring that chemicals and microbes can’t get through to our clean brain and cause it problems. But it filters out good and intentional molecules too, and has proven a stumbling block for doctors’ aim to get drugs straight to where they are needed.
But new study claims to have found a way, developing special molecules that can trick the BBB by exploiting the mechanism that let nutrients into the brain.