Brain cancer is one of the most difficult malignancies to detect and treat, in large part because of the difficulty in getting imaging and therapeutic agents past the so-called blood-brain barrier and into the brain.
Several groups of investigators have found that nanoparticles hold promise for ferrying such agents into the brain (click here for more information), and now two new papers published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics provide additional hope that nanotechnology may yield important advances in detecting and treating brain cancer.
In an attempt to breech the blood-brain barrier, Klaus Langer, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, attached apolipoprotein E (AopE), a protein that the body uses to transport cholesterol and fatty acids through the bloodstream and into the brain, to the surface of albumin nanoparticles. Albumin nanoparticles have already been used successfully to deliver the anticancer drug paclitaxel to breast tumors as part of the recently approved drug Abraxane® (click here for earlier news story).
Using a painkiller that cannot enter the brain as a model drug, the investigators showed that albumin nanoparticles decorated with chemically attached ApoE is able to transport large amounts of this drug across the blood-brain barrier in mice. To prepare these nanoparticles, the researchers first created albumin nanoparticles loaded with the model drug. They then used poly(ethylene glycol) and a second linker to anchor the ApoE molecules onto the surface of the nanoparticles. The resulting nanoparticles were then administered to mice via intravenous injection and were shown to exhibit the desired analgesic effect.
In the second paper, Lucienne Juillerat-Jeanneret, Ph.D., and her colleagues at the University Institute of Pathology in Lausanne, Switzerland, presented the results of a study designed to characterize how various coatings would affect the brain biocompatibility of iron oxide nanoparticles. Iron oxide nanoparticles have already shown promise in brain cancer imaging and therapeutic studies (click here for earlier news story).