Trick Used By Rabies Virus Could Help Deliver Drug Deep In The Brain

Highlights

• By learning how rabies virus travels in the brain, Anti-Parkinson’s drug can be delivered deep in the brain where currently the drugs are not able to reach.
• Rabies virus has the capability to trick the nervous system and cross the blood brain barrier. This trick could be used for drug design.
• Glycoprotein 29 present on the rabies virus is attached to a nanoparticle stuffed full of deferoxamine ( Anti-Parkinson’s medication) and injected into the brain to trick the brain.

Rabies virus may have some tricks to bypass the blood brain barrier, this trick can be used to treat disease that require drugs to effectively cross the blood brain barrier, finds a new study. The findings of this study are published in the ACS Nano journal. The researchers can now exploit rabies viruses machinery to deliver a Parkinson’s disease medication directly to the brain.

While the common cause of Parkinson’s disease is unknown, it has been proved that accumulation of iron in neurons is one of the commonest features of Parkinson’s disease.

Researchers are now using a metal-grabbing compound called deferoxamine to sop up the excess iron in patients. But a large quantity of this drug needs to reach the brain in order for them work.

To usher deferoxamine into the brain, the researchers Yan-Zhong Chang, Xin Lou, Guangjun Nie took advantage of a key part of the rabies virus- Glycoprotein 29.

Glycoprotein 29 present on the rabies virus is attached to a nanoparticle stuffed full of deferoxamine ( Anti-Parkinson’s medication) and injected into the brain to trick the brain.

When they injected this iron-grabbing nanoparticles into mouse models of Parkinson’s disease, the iron levels in the mouse models dropped and this reduced brain damage caused by Parkinson’s disease.

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Reference

1. Linhao You, Jing Wang, Tianqing Liu, Yinlong Zhang, Xuexiang Han, Ting Wang, Shanshan Guo, Tianyu Dong, Junchao Xu, Gregory J. Anderson, Qiang Liu, Yan-Zhong Chang, Xin Lou, and Guangjun Nie . Targeted Brain Delivery of Rabies Virus Glycoprotein 29-Modified Deferoxamine-Loaded Nanoparticles Reverses Functional Deficits in Parkinsonian Mice, ACS Nano (2018).DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.7b08172

Source-Medindia