Sneaking past the Brain’s Gatekeeper
A Global Effort to Improve Drug Delivery for Alzheimer’s and Brain Diseases
The brain is protected by a powerful shield called the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB). It acts like a security system, keeping harmful substances out, but unfortunately it also blocks many helpful medicines from getting in. This makes treating brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and brain cancer incredibly difficult. For example, less than 1% of the recently approved Alzheimer’s drug donanemab reaches the brain.
That’s why researchers from the University of Warwick and Fudan University are working together to better understand how the BBB works and how to get more medicine more efficiently into the brain. The team will predict and then test the features important for shuttling drugs into the brain. They will combine making new polymeric drug carriers and already published data-sets to use in machine learning to analyse large datasets and predict which drug designs are most likely to succeed.
This international project brings together experts in medicine, polymer chemistry, genetics, and machine learning. It builds on previous collaborations between Warwick and Fudan and includes a newly funded PhD student focused on this challenge. The goal is to unlock the principles that will allow more efficient ways to deliver life-changing treatments into the brain, making current therapeutic options better and enabling novel approaches for future drugs.
Dr Robert Dallmann
Warwick Medical School
University of Warwick
Prof Mingliang Fang
Department of Environmental Science & Technology
Fudan University