New Model May Help Overcome the Brain's Fortress-Like Barrier

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Scientists have helped provide a way to better understand how to enable drugs to enter the brain and how cancer cells make it past the blood brain barrier.

Scientists have helped provide a way to better understand how to enable drugs to enter the brain and how cancer cells make it past the blood brain barrier.

The brain is protected by the near-impermeable blood brain barrier, a fortress which protects the brain but which also prevents the treatment of brain diseases, including brain tumours.

Dr Zaynah Maherally and team at the University of Portsmouth have developed a model that mimics the blood brain barrier, which could pave the way for better, more efficient and reliable tests of drugs to treat brain diseases.

The model, the result of slow painstaking research started in 2007, is published in the FASEB Journal.

Read more at University of Portsmouth

Image: This is the fortress: The blood brain barrier. (Credit: Samah Jassam)