Ultrasound, the decades-old technology known for giving early glimpses of unborn babies, could hold a key to a problem that has long challenged drug developers: getting medicines to hard-to-reach places to treat diseases like Alzheimer\u2019s and cancer.<\/p>\n
A cutting-edge approach that combines ultrasound waves with tiny bubbles of inert gas injected into the bloodstream can get more chemotherapy to tumor cells and enable drugs to breach one of the most stubborn frontiers in the human body\u2014the blood-brain barrier. It is also being explored as a new way to deliver gene therapy.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an extremely wide variety of where this sort of drug delivery or augmentation with ultrasound and bubbles can take us,\u201d says Flemming Forsberg, professor of radiology and director of ultrasound physics at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. The effectiveness of drugs in treating diseases like cancer, Alzheimer\u2019s and Parkinson\u2019s is often limited by poor penetration into tissues, he says, whether in the brain or in tumors in other parts of the body.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n Ultrasound waves are combined with tiny bubbles in the bloodstream in a cutting-edge approach to deliver medicines to hard-to-reach places to treat diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer https:\/\/t.co\/mzjVCjUN02<\/a><\/p>\n — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 31, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n \n