The potential to treat currently untreatable brain diseases
The team says one of the main barriers to finding a cure for diseases such as dementia and motor neurone disease is the current inability to deliver treatments that can cross the blood-brain barrier, a membrane that blocks foreign entities reaching the brain.
First author and PhD researcher, Rashad Kariuki, was excited to work with nanoparticles that would be small enough to pass through this membrane.
“We currently have limited treatments that can pass through the blood-brain barrier because many are just too big or don’t interact favourably with this particular membrane,” he said.
“If we could use nanoparticles to treat brain diseases non-invasively, that would be a gamechanger.”
More work needs to be done before nanoparticles reach their full potential to help treat diseases but new wound treatments using this technology are in development, Elbourne said.
“We have collaborators at the University of South Australia that we’re working with on treatments for chronic and acute wounds,” Elbourne said.
“Ultimately, our work could positively impact a wide range of treatments, meaning better outcomes for patients and health systems.”
‘Behavior of Citrate-Capped Ultrasmall Gold Nanoparticles on a Supported Lipid Bilayer Interface at Atomic Resolution’ is published in the ACS Nano journal (DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.2c07751).
The co-authors are Rashad Kariuki, Rowan Penman, Saffron Bryant, Rebecca Orrell-Trigg, Nastaran Meftahi, Russell Crawford, Chris McConville, Gary Bryant, Kislon Voïtchovsky, Charlotte Conn, Andrew Christofferson and Aaron Elbourne.
Story: Will Wright