In an article published on the Oncotarget.com website, the use of transfemoral injection of NEO100 to provide entry for therapeutics into the brain is explored. The paper provides an overview of the existing issue with clinicians to try and find better ways to get pharma-therapeutics past the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) for patients struggling with CNS-based diseases such as Glioblastoma Multiforme. 

The paper reviews how using a single dosage of a transfemorally injection of NEO100 provided an entry of Evans blue (EB) dye into the cranial tissue. Because of its tight binding to large globular proteins EB is unable to penetrate an intact BBB, but with the pre-injection of NEO100, the test animals showed an uptake of the dye into the brain tissue.

In further studies using methotrexate (MTX), a commonly used chemotherapeutic used for brain cancer treatment, the injected NEO100 provided BBB permeability for two to four hours thereby allowing the MTX to pass into the brain tissue. After that period the BBB restored itself. 

In another animal study with intracranially implanted tumor cells in the test subjects, NEO100 along with trastuzumab was used to determine the impact on the cancer cells. In an immunohistological analysis, the brains of the animals who had the NEO100 administered showed the presence of trastuzumab whereas the animals who did not receive the NEO100 did not show any uptake of trastuzumab.

The paper concludes that clinical implementation of this new BBB-opening method might achieve better success rates in the treatment of brain-localized malignancies as do current treatments for peripherally distributed tumors and as a result, provide reduced morbidity and increased patient survivability.

Read The Paper

From the groin to the brain: a transfemoral path to blood-brain barrier opening.

Authors: Thomas C. Chen¹, Wenjun Wang²and Axel H. Schönthal³

¹Department of Neurological Surgery, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA, ²Department of Neurological Surgery, USC, Luzhou, China, ³Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA