Bridging the Blood-Brain Barrier New Methods Improve the Odds of Getting Drugs to the Brain Cells That Need Them 英文参考文献.docVIP

Feature Bridging the Blood-Brain Barrier: New Methods Improve the Odds of Getting Drugs to the Brain Cells That Need Them Dan Ferber W hen it comes to brain disease, William Pardridge knows the numbers, and he’ll rattle them off at the drop of a hat. One in ?ve: the number of people with a disorder of the brain or central nervous system. Half a trillion dollars: what we’ll spend in the year 2020 to treat Alzheimer disease and stroke alone, and about what we now spend annually on national defense. And then there’s the number of good drugs available, after decades of research, to help brain cells survive in patients with those disorders: zero. Brain diseases by the dozens lack effective therapies, but it’s not for lack of trying, says Pardridge, a professor of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (United States): Pharmaceutical companies have failed to deliver effective new brain drugs, despite huge potential markets for Alzheimer disease, stroke, Parkinson disease, brain infections, and more. What’s more, “NIH is funding billions of dollars a year on molecular neuroscience research on the assumption that therapies for these diseases will be translated from the basic biological research,” but that assumption is proving to be false, he says. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050169.g001 A network of capillaries supply brain cells with nutrients. Tight seals in their walls keep blood toxins—and many bene?cial drugs—out of the brain. And while biology is a major roadblock, the more important problem is that the ?eld of blood-brain barrier drug delivery has been neglected, underfunded, and underdeveloped, says Pardridge. “Not a single large pharmaceutical company in the world today has a blood-brain barrier drug-targeting program,” he says. And “not a single academic neuroscience program in the United States teaches blood-brain barrier drug delivery.” Unhappy with the progress, a few years ago Pardridge founded Armagen, a startup biotech company devoted to ?ndi