American researchers have developed a treatment based on nanoparticles in mice that could overcome gliobastoma, the most common and aggressive form of brain cancer.
the glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) or Glioblastoma, better known as “grade 4 astrocytoma”, is the most common and aggressive brain tumor there is. It is also unfortunately one of the most difficult to cure: from the moment a person is diagnosed, their average life expectancy is less than 15 months. But all that could change very soon thanks to a drug based on nanoparticles designed by American researchers that could shrink the tumor and prevent it from re-emerging.
Working with mice, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have succeeded in developing nanoparticles capable of crossing the brain’s blood barrier which separates the latter from the blood and prevents large molecules from entering the brain. Thanks to this, they were able to pass large doses of chemotherapy treatments with disastrous side effects into the brains of mice when they are injected into the body. Temozolomide, usually the first drug given to patients with glioblastoma, for example, tends to make the patient extremely nauseous and weak.
Life expectancy doubled in mice
By experimenting with mice, MIT researchers succeeded in integrating it into nanoparticles. They added to the latter a protein of the type Bromodomain inhibitors JQ-1. By combining these molecules, the researchers have created a treatment that disrupts the DNA repair mechanisms of tumor cells and then attacks them with their defenses down.
Result: the mice treated with this method survived twice as long as the others. Another advantage of this new technique: their blood cells and others were less affected by temozolomide than if it had been administered in the traditional way.
A technique that would allow more treatments to be administered correctly
According to researchers at MIT, this new technique could eventually allow many other treatments for gliobastoma to pass into the brain, previously unable to cross the brain’s blood barrier. “The list of drugs we can use to treat brain cancer is so short that a medium that could allow us to use more chemotherapy drugs to treat this disease could be a serious game changer,” says Scott Floyd, the one of the study’s authors. And to conclude: “maybe we could make more standard chemotherapy drugs effective if we could send them around the blood barrier of the brain with a tool like this”.
However, this “super cocktail” is not yet ready to be tested on patients. Since the bromodomain inhibitor JQ-1 used in mice cannot function in humans, other proteins of the same family are currently in clinical trials.
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