A study showed that intranasal delivery with a NEO100-based formulation enables noninvasive, therapeutic delivery to the brain of a pharmaceutical agent that otherwise does not efficiently cross the BBB. One such agent is bortezomib (BZM), a proteasome inhibitor that is approved for the treatment of multiple myeloma. Preclinical studies established that BZM can be effective against glioblastoma (GBM), but only when the drug is delivered via catheter directly into the brain lesion, not after intravenous systemic delivery.

In the small animal study, the researchers applied intranasal drug delivery, where they co-administered BZM together with NEO100, a highly purified, GMP-manufactured version of perillyl alcohol that is used in clinical trials for intranasal therapy of GBM patients.

The researchers found that intranasal delivery of BZM combined with NEO100 significantly prolonged the survival of tumor-bearing animals over those that received vehicle alone and also over those that received BZM alone or NEO100 alone. Moreover, BZM concentrations in the brain were higher after intranasal co-delivery with NEO100 as compared to delivery in the absence of NEO100.

The study showed that intranasal delivery with a NEO100-based formulation enables noninvasive, therapeutically effective brain delivery of a pharmaceutical agent that otherwise does not efficiently cross the BBB.

Read The Paper

Efficient brain targeting and therapeutic intracranial activity of bortezomib through intranasal co-delivery with NEO100 in rodent glioblastoma mode

Authors: Weijun Wang, MD¹, Steve Swenson, PhD¹, Hee-Yeon Cho, PhD¹, Florence M. Hofman, PhD², Axel H. Schönthal, PhD³, and Thomas C. Chen, MD, PhD^1,2

¹ Departments of Neurosurgery, ² Department of Pathology, ³ Molecular Microbiology & Immunology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California