Following a major discovery in brain medicine, doctors can now injects drugs into people's brains.
Drugs can now be injected straight into the brain
The move is one that doctors have been trying to solve for awhile because the impact of drugs would be so much more immediate and powerful if it went straight into the brain.
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Under normal circumstances, 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.
However, the BBB also filters out good and intentional molecules too which has proven a stumbling block for doctors, preventing them from getting drugs straight to the brain.
But according to the new research finding, doctors have found a way around this by developing special molecules that can trick the BBB into thinking that they should be let through by exploiting the mechanism that let nutrients into the brain.
The research was done by a team from the Canadian National Research Council which made carrier molecules that help disease-fighting ones break through, where they can then release the therapeutics they need, straight into the nervous system.
It is hoped that the discovery can be used to treat brain diseases in the nearest future.
In the meantime, the discovery has already been successfully tested on animals, through a non-invasive procedure that put the molecules into rats and it was found that the molecules have a highly potent effect.
Clinical trials are now set to take place over the next 10 years.
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