BOCA RATON, Fla. – It’s estimated that 5.8 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease or some form of dementia.
Getting medication to the affected area in the brain to provide treatment before the disease takes hold is the challenge.
For a decade now, Dr. Quin Wang and her team at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta have been working with a peptide derived from a surface receptor in the brain.
“And this receptor draws our attention because it’s a super essential one to protect the neurons of the brain from all various insults,” Wang said.
Speculation is that delivering a targeted therapy through a nasal spray could be the perfect way to treat brain disease and injuries.
“For the central drugs the nasal deliver is really an attractive path,” Wang said.
Dr. James Galvin with UHealth’s Comprehensive Center for Brain Health agrees.
“In the roof of your nose are little nerve fibers that enable you to smell and if you were to hit those nerve fibers, it can get right to the brain which is much faster than taking a pill that gets metabolized by your G.I. tract,” Galvin said.
But he said Wang’s study also showed promise in treating epileptic seizures. He also added that clinical trials on nasal sprays for other conditions have revealed shortcomings to the approach.
“It’s really important to develop a device that delivers the proper dose to the right part of the nose. Delivered to the wrong part of the nose it’s not absorbed into the brain,” Galvin said.
Wang and her colleagues are still looking for funding to continue their research beyond mice models and into human studies.
“We just are really hoping that we not only cure the mice, we want to optimize this and test it in humans. That’s our optimum goal,” Wang said.
Hopes are with funding from the National Institutes of health, human trials can begin within the next 5 years.