Brains with curry sauce
Curcumin was "taught" to overcome the blood-brain barrier
NanoNewsNet based on materials from Vanderbilt University (Curcumin's ability to fight Alzheimer's studied – VM).
One of the most promising new drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease may already be in your kitchen. The substance curcumin contained in the popular curry sauce has been used in many Asian cultures for centuries, but now scientists have synthesized a close chemical analogue of curcumin, which has properties that can make it useful for the treatment of brain diseases.
"Curcumin has the ability to enter the brain, bind and destroy beta-amyloid plaques characteristic of Alzheimer's disease, with reduced toxicity," says the head of a study recently published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease (McClure et al. Inhalable Curcumin: Offering the Potential for Translation to Imaging and Treatment of Alzheimer's Disease – VM), Wellington Pham, PhD, Associate Professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University.
In Alzheimer's disease, the accumulation and aggregation of fragments of a protein known as beta-amyloid leads to irreversible loss of brain neurons.
The development of low-molecular compounds that slow down this accumulation or contribute to their destruction is very important, but the inability of these small molecules to overcome the blood-brain barrier is a limiting factor in the delivery of drugs to the brain.
Dr. Fem and his colleagues from Shiga Prefectural University of Medical Science (Shiga University of Medical Science), Japan, have developed a new more effective strategy for delivering a molecule close to curcumin to the brain.
"One of the difficulties in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease is to overcome the blood–brain barrier," explains Dr. Fem. "Our body has developed this barrier to protect the brain from any toxic molecules that can enter it and damage neurons. But it is also a natural barrier for molecules with a therapeutic effect."
To avoid the problems associated with intravenous administration of the drug, scientists decided to develop an atomizer that allows you to get curcumin aerosol. Japanese researchers synthesized the FMeC1 molecule close to curcumin.
"The advantage of FMeC1 is that it is a perfluorine compound that can be noninvasively monitored in the brain using magnetic resonance imaging for its bio-distribution. Curcumin is a very simple chemical structure, so getting its analogue is inexpensive. In this form [of an aerosol], this drug can be inhaled, and it will be delivered to the brain," the scientist continues, noting that sprayers are already on the market and are also relatively inexpensive.
In experiments on transgenic mice with a model of Alzheimer's disease, researchers have shown that the delivery of curcumin to the cerebral cortex and hippocampus in the form of an aerosol is more effective than its intravenous administration.
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