Brainstem glioma is often diagnosed in children and young adults and has a low survival rate. A multidisciplinary team at Washington University in St. Louis developed a technique that delivered a therapeutic agent to the gliomas using focused ultrasound with very promising results.
Dezhuang Ye, a doctoral student in the lab of Hong Chen, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the McKelvey School of Engineering and of radiation oncology at the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, has been working to develop the focused ultrasound-mediated intranasal brain drug delivery, known as FUSIN.
Ye, who recently defended her doctoral thesis, delivered an immune checkpoint inhibitor to the brainstem gliomas in a mouse model using FUSIN, which resulted in drug accumulation within the brainstem. They found that FUSIN boosted the accumulation of the immune checkpoint inhibitor at its target by an average of four times more compared with intranasal delivery alone. Results were published in Pharmaceutics on Feb. 1.
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