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Headlines 7 Ten Years On: medical device could be a gamechanger for treating brain disease Developed here in New Zealand, a potentially revolutionary medical system for treating brain disorders is a step closer to reality. P rofessor John Reynolds and his colleagues at the University of Otago have been granted a United States patent for the system which is designed to deliver drugs across the blood-brain barrier using ultrasonic waves. It is the culmination of 12 years of hard work by Professor Reynolds, whose research career began when he received the VJ Chapman Fellowship from the Neurological Foundation to transition from a medical doctor to a neurological researcher. In the last ten years he has received three major research grants from the Foundation, one which directly contributed to the development of the technology, and two which added to the rationale behind the system. When it reaches a point where it is safe to use in humans, it could be a gamechanger in treating brain disorders. The blood-brain barrier has evolved to shield our brain from foreign substances in the bloodstream, but it does such an effective job it is incredibly difficult to get medication across it. The technology could be used by clinicians worldwide to safely and more effectively deliver drugs to treat epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and brain cancer. It has already been proven to stop seizure activity in models of epilepsy. Professor Reynolds describes it as the pinnacle of his career and hopes it could be ready for human trials in five years’ time. “We can now get the drugs into the brain in the areas they are needed when they are needed, in a way that is much more similar to how the brain would normally work. You just can’t achieve that with a pill,” he says. Last year Professor Reynolds received $270,000 for a two-year study to investigate the technology as a potential treatment for Parkinson’s disease. Notable contributions have also been made by Dr Shakila Rizwan, who received a Neurological Foundation Wrightson Fellowship in 2009 to investigate the technology for epilepsy patients. This allowed her to perform some important proof of concept experiments on cellular models of epilepsy that have been recently published in the journal Pharmaceutics. Dr Rizwan has gone on to set up her own lab at the University of Otago, and now continues to collaborate on the development of this system that will hopefully be able to treat intractable epilepsy in the future. The Otago scientists have also worked with Kamahi and Callaghan Innovation to develop a headset as part of the treatment. Smell could be key to treating several brain diseases Loss of smell can be one of the first symptoms of neurological disease including Parkinson’s, dementia and Alzheimer’s. S cientists believe this is because the neurons responsible for smell are the first to deteriorate in the progression of these diseases. Smell, memory and emotion are closely intertwined. Smell is the only sense that directly enters themid-region of our brain, where our emotions andmemories are processed, via the olfactory bulb. This is why a scent can spark intense emotions and nostalgia for past events. Professor Maurice Curtis’s lab at the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland has done extensive research on the brain and smell. Two emerging young scientists at the Centre have been funded by the Neurological Foundation to complete their own projects on the olfactory bulb. Dr Ruth Monk is looking at loss of smell as an early indicator of Parkinson’s disease. Using a non-invasive technique, Dr Monk is sampling olfactory bulb neurons from study volunteers with Parkinson’s disease. “Our research proposes that Parkinson’s disease could be stopped in its tracks at this very early point, before motor symptoms appear, by preventing the spread of damage from the nasal cavity to the brain.” Dr Molly Swanson was funded to complete her doctoral scholarship to study smell and Alzheimer’s disease. “Maurice and I developed a project to further our understanding of disease processes in the olfactory bulb, utilising one key resource we have in the Centre for Brain Research, the Neurological Foundation Human Brain Bank. “I aimed to determinewhether therewere changes in inflammation in the olfactory bulb inAlzheimer’s disease and whether these changeswere associatedwith disease pathology.” Following this study Dr Swanson went on to receive the Neurological Foundation of New Zealand's First Fellowship to study Motor Neuron Disease. Dr Ruth Monk Dr Molly Swanson