Category: Featured

UNC Team Uses Cellular Bubbles to Deliver Parkinson’s Meds Directly to Brain

May 4, 2015

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have used exosomes — tiny bubbles of protein and fat produced naturally by cells — to bypass the body’s defenses and deliver a potent biopharmaceutical directly to the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease. Elena Batrakova, PhD, and her colleagues at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Center for Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery extracted exosomes from immune cells and successfully loaded them with the enzyme catalase, a potent antioxidant that counters the neuron-killing inflammation responsible for Parkinson’s and other degenerative neurological disorders. Their work was published in the Journal of Controlled … Read more

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