RespiteMatch.com Health Blog

By CHERYL WITTENAUER
Associated Press Writer

5:44 PM PDT, August 22, 2005

ST. LOUIS — Scientists have developed a cancer-fighting compound that can sneak past a protective blood barrier in the brain, enabling it to fight brain cancer, according to a Department of Veterans Affairs and Saint Louis University animal study published this week.

Dr. William Banks of St. Louis, a pioneer in drug-delivery to the brain, has shown that the compound, JV-1-36, identified by former colleague and Nobel Laureate Andrew Schally at the VA and Tulane University, “clearly penetrates the blood brain barrier,” Schally said by phone from his New Orleans office.

“That means it can be used for treatment of a malignant brain tumor,” he said. “The next step is to develop it for clinical use.” He predicted the drug could be available in two to three years.

The study will be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

The so-called blood brain barrier refers to cells that surround the inside of blood vessels in the brain that form a tight zipper, inhibiting the transfer of molecules to the brain to keep it safe.

Thousands of compounds are developed every year that will attack a tumor or cancer cell, but cannot penetrate the barrier.

“If you can circumvent it and deliver to a brain tumor, that’s a major breakthrough,” said University of Arizona College of Medicine researcher Thomas P. Davis, who studies the blood brain barrier in patients suffering stroke, hypertension or brain inflammation.

Banks, lead researcher and Saint Louis University professor of geriatrics and pharmacology, said the trick was making the compound lipid soluble — like nicotine — that melds into the blood vessel’s membrane.

The other challenge was to get it past an extra guardian in the barrier that keeps anticancer drugs out of the brain. “This molecule has that mix,” Banks said.

He noted that the guardian did intercept some of the cancer-fighting compound that was injected into mice, but let much of it pass into the brain to treat cancer.

Schally said he developed the cancer-fighting compound over a period of 12 years, but recruited Banks, a leading authority on delivering drugs to the brain, to show it could pass through the barrier.

Banks found it could be delivered to the brain in substantial amounts.

Banks said while sometimes an animal model and the human condition have big differences, that isn’t true in this case.

Pretty much the same rules apply — in mice and humans — in getting drugs across the blood brain barrier to fight cancer, he said.

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On the Net:

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.pnas.org/