Joint team from Seoul St. Mary's Hospital and POSTECH uses olfactory nerves to bypass blood-brain barrier, reducing immunosuppressive side effects
South Korean researchers have confirmed a technology that bypasses the blood-brain barrier — long considered the greatest obstacle to treating glioblastoma, one of the most intractable brain tumors — to deliver anticancer drugs precisely to the tumor site.
A joint research team led by Yang Seung-ho, a neurosurgery professor at Catholic University of Korea Seoul St. Mary's Hospital, Park Sung-min, a professor of IT convergence engineering at POSTECH, and Kim Won-jong, a chemistry professor at POSTECH, said Thursday they had developed a new drug delivery method that administers anticancer nanoparticles through the nose, then uses a magnetic field to guide them precisely to a glioblastoma tumor. Applied to an animal model, the approach produced a significant extension in survival.
Glioblastoma is the most common type of primary malignant brain tumor in adults, accounting for roughly 65 percent of all primary malignant central nervous system tumors. Data from the National Cancer Information Center show a 10-year survival rate of just 5.3 percent, reflecting an extremely poor prognosis.
The key innovation was not the development of a new drug to enhance the efficacy of existing anticancer agents, but a change in the route by which drugs reach the tumor.
The team focused on combining two ideas: that the olfactory nerve, which connects directly to the brain, provides a natural pathway from the nasal cavity to the brain parenchyma, and that magnetic nanoparticles can have their direction of movement controlled by an external magnetic field.
In animal experiments, the team administered the compound to glioblastoma model mice and tracked survival over 90 days. Median survival was 27 days in the control group, 51 days in the group that received the compound alone, and 72 days in the group that received the compound followed by transcranial magnetic stimulation. Particularly notable was the dosage: the drug dose used in the combination group was only about 5.6 percent — roughly one-eighteenth — of the standard oral dose. Despite this, the team observed a substantial survival-extending effect.
The research was published in the international journal Drug Delivery and Translational Research.
woo@heraldcorp.com
