Richard J. Price, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia's School of Medicine and School of Engineering, is using focused soundwaves to overcome the natural 'blood-brain barrier,' which protects the brain from harmful pathogens. Photo courtesy of Dan Addison | UVA Communications

Richard J. Price, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia's School of Medicine and School of Engineering, is using focused soundwaves to overcome the natural 'blood-brain barrier,' which protects the brain from harmful pathogens. Photo courtesy of Dan Addison | UVA Communications


May 7, 2020 — University of Virginia researchers are pioneering the use of focused ultrasound to defy the brain's protective barrier so that doctors could, at last, deliver many treatments directly into the brain to battle neurological diseases. The approach, the researchers hope, could revolutionize treatment for conditions from Alzheimer's to epilepsy to brain tumors - and even help repair the devastating damage caused by stroke.

Richard J. Price, Ph.D., of UVA's School of Medicine and School of Engineering, is using focused soundwaves to overcome the natural "blood-brain barrier," which protects the brain from harmful pathogens. His approach aims to breach the barrier only where needed, and only when needed, and then deliver treatments in exquisitely precise fashion.

"The blood-brain barrier is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, challenge to drug delivery for the central nervous system," Price explained. "Evolution gave us this barrier because the central nervous system needs to be protected. The problem is now we want to deliver something to those cells and evolution has had millions and millions of years to optimize a solution to stop it. ... So I'm attempting to circumvent biology with physics."

Focused Ultrasound's Great Potential

Focused ultrasound focuses sound waves inside the brain much like a magnifying glass can focus light, letting doctors manipulate tissue without cutting into the skull. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), meanwhile, lets them watch what's happening inside the brain in real time. While Price, a biomedical engineer, is developing his techniques in the lab, doctors are already using the technology to treat conditions such as Parkinson's tremor.

Price marvels at the approach's specificity. "With MRI, we can look at the target, whether it's a brain tumor or maybe it's a part of the brain we want to do gene therapy on, and we can select it — we can actually make a treatment plan and say, We only want to open the [blood-brain] barrier there. The other 95% of the brain, we don't even touch," said Price, the research director at UVA's Focused Ultrasound Center. "Then, when we apply the focused ultrasound, it opens the barrier there for a few hours. It lets us get the gene therapy across, and then it closes naturally."

Delivering Gene Therapy

Gene therapy introduced via focused ultrasound would essentially reprogram faulty cells.

For brain tumors, Price is exploring the potential of using focused ultrasound to deliver gene therapy via "deep-penetrating nanoparticles." The nanoparticles, designed by Price's collaborators at Johns Hopkins University, "are specifically engineered to penetrate the tissue extremely well," he said. The problem has been transporting them where they're needed, often deep inside the brain, and Price says focused ultrasound holds the answer.

His solution is to use the focused soundwaves to open spaces between cells in the tissue. "It doesn't help us if you can't get to the neuron that's 50 microns away," he said. "So that becomes an engineering transport problem."

In addition to delivering the therapy, focused ultrasound can "precondition" targeted tissue to enhance the effectiveness of the gene delivery up to five-fold, Price has found. The preconditioning represents a "simple and effective strategy" to boost the benefits of the nanoparticles, he and his colleagues report in a scientific paper.

Improving Stroke Outcomes

For stroke, a condition that is often debilitating when it's not deadly, Price aims to help the brain heal itself. He would do this by using focused ultrasound to put "homing molecules" inside damaged areas to recruit neural stem cells to do repairs. For this, his team has developed an innovative technique called "sonoselective transfection" that avoids opening the blood-brain barriers in brains that are already compromised.

"With stroke, there's a lot of effort to try to salvage as much neural tissue as possible by doing things like gene therapy," he said. "In our lab, we thought, well, maybe we can deliver treatment right to the cells that need it, without breaching the blood-brain barrier. And my students basically figured out how to do that."

That notion of helping the body heal itself, of using focused ultrasound to activate an immune response, could be useful in cancer treatments as well. "We would love to be able to put something into those [tumor] cells that will then allow them to start recruiting immune cells into the tumor," he said. "We have a lot of evidence that we can we can do some interesting things with focused ultrasound with respect to the internal landscape of those tumors."

Price, of UVA's Department of Biomedical Engineering, emphasizes that his work is still early, but he is excited to be creating new techniques that could change how many major diseases are treated in the not-too-distant future.

"We've had good results [with the research] so far. But what I, as an engineer, get excited about are all these tools we have made," he said. "You can use these tools for all these different applications. We think there are a lot of really exciting possibilities."

For more information: www.healthsystem.virginia.edu/home


Related Content

News | Radiology Business

July 25, 2024 — Immunis, Inc., a clinical-stage biotech developing groundbreaking secretome therapeutics for age and ...

Time July 25, 2024
arrow
News | Radiology Business

July 19, 2024 — GE HealthCare announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Intelligent Ultrasound Group PLC’s ...

Time July 19, 2024
arrow
Feature | Women's Health | By Jordan Bazinsky

Investing in women’s health should not merely be a metric on the equity dashboard — it should drive policy and tactical ...

Time July 08, 2024
arrow
News | Ultrasound Women's Health

June 18, 2024 — The International Society of Ultrasound in Obstetrics and Gynecology (ISUOG) has announced details of ...

Time June 18, 2024
arrow
News | Artificial Intelligence

June 11, 2024 — A new study led by researchers at Emory AI.Health, published in the Journal of Computers in Medicine and ...

Time June 11, 2024
arrow
News | Breast Imaging

June 7, 2024 — Scholars and studies funded by Susan G. Komen(R), the world’s leading breast cancer organization ...

Time June 07, 2024
arrow
News | Radiopharmaceuticals and Tracers

June 7, 2024 — Shine Technologies, LLC, a pioneer in next-generation fusion-based technology, today announced a new ...

Time June 07, 2024
arrow
News | Oncology Information Management Systems (OIMS)

May 30, 2024 — RaySearch Laboratories AB announced the release of the latest version of RayCare, the next generation ...

Time May 30, 2024
arrow
News | Radiology Business

May 29, 2024 — Strategic Radiology added a third California member to the nation’s leading coalition of independent ...

Time May 29, 2024
arrow
News | Point-of-Care Ultrasound (POCUS)

May 20, 2024 — Exo (pronounced “echo”), a medical imaging software and devices company, announced the release of Exo ...

Time May 20, 2024
arrow
Subscribe Now