𝐍𝐓/ Nanoparticle platform could make delivering drugs to the brain easier
Neuroscience biweekly vol. 23, 28th December — 8th January
TL;DR
- To facilitate successful delivery of therapeutic agents to the brain, a team of bioengineers and physicians created a nanoparticle platform, which can facilitate therapeutically effective delivery of encapsulated agents in mice with a physically breached or intact BBB. In a mouse model of traumatic brain injury (TBI), they observed that the delivery system showed three times more accumulation in the brain than conventional methods of delivery.
- Peeking inside ‘mini-brains’ could boost understanding of the human brain. ‘Mini-brains’ are pin-head sized collections of several different types of human brain cell. They are used as a tool, allowing scientists to learn about how the brain develops, study disease and test new medicines. Personalized ‘mini-brains’ can be grown from stem cells generated from a sample of human hair or skin and could shed light on how brain disease progresses in an individual and how this person may respond to drugs.
- Researchers have shown that Chiari 1 malformation can be caused by variations in two genes linked to brain development, and that children with large heads are at increased risk of developing the condition.
- What happens in the brain when our conscious awareness fades during general anesthesia and normal sleep? Scientists studied this question with novel experimental designs and functional brain imaging. They succeeded in separating the specific changes related to consciousness from the more widespread overall effects, and discovered that the effects of anesthesia and sleep on brain activity were surprisingly similar.
- Researchers have discovered what type of neural mechanisms are the basis for emotional responses to music. Altogether 102 research subjects listened to music that evokes emotions while their brain function was scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
- The introduction of computer simulation to the identification of symptoms in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has potential to provide an additional objective tool to gauge the presence and severity of behavioral problems, researchers suggest.
- Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma. How its symptoms, including anxiety, depression and cognitive disturbances arise remains incompletely understood and unpredictable. Treatments and outcomes could potentially be improved if doctors could better predict who would develop PTSD. Now, researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have found potential brain biomarkers of PTSD in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
- Both adults and kids who vape were more likely to report difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions than their non-vaping, non-smoking peers on annual national surveys. Survey results also suggest that kids were more likely to experience mental fog if they started vaping before the age of 14.
- Lithium is considered the gold standard for treating bipolar disorder (BD), but nearly 70 percent of people with BD don’t respond to it. This leaves them at risk for debilitating, potentially life-threatening mood swings. Researchers at the Salk Institute have found that the culprit may lie in gene activity — or lack of it.
- A team of rehabilitation researchers has studied processing speed deficits in individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI), comparing their brain activation patterns with those of healthy age-matched controls, and older healthy individuals. They found that the SCI group and older controls had similar activation patterns, but the SCI group differed significantly from their age-matched controls.
…And more!
#NT #Neuroscience
https://medium.com/paradigm-fund/nt-nanoparticle-platform-could-make-delivering-drugs-to-the-brain-easier-821b0b1c6b0d 
