A compound that kills cancer can sneak past the blood brain barrier, which protects the brain from foreign substances, to do its work in fighting a particularly invasive brain cancer, according to a new Saint Louis University animal study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition the week of Aug. 22.
"The bottom line is, if you can get drugs into the brain, you can cure brain cancer," says William A. Banks, M.D., professor of geriatrics in the department of internal medicine and professor of pharmacological and physiological science at Saint Louis University School of Medicine and a member of the research team.
The compound – JV-1-36 – is an antagonist of the hypothalamic growth hormone- releasing hormone, which has been found to cause cancerous tumors, such as malignant glioblastomas, to grow. The main known purposes of the hypothalamic growth hormone-releasing hormone usually are to trigger the hormone that makes children grow and affect how glucose is used in adults.
Researchers found that the P-gp system, an extra guardian located at the blood brain barrier that usually keeps anticancer drugs out of the brain, intercepted some of the JV-1-36 that was injected into mice but let much of it pass into the brain to treat cancer.
"The blood brain barrier is set up to very carefully patrol what it lets into the brain and what it keeps out. It makes these decisions based on the physicochemical properties," says Dr. Banks, who also is a staff physician at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis.