Treatment offers Alzheimer’s hope
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DISCOVERY: Scientist from the School of Therapeutic Sciences Professor Viness Pillay. Picture: YouTube DISCOVERY: Scientist from the School of Therapeutic Sciences Professor Viness Pillay. Picture: YouTube
Johannesburg - A novel way for local researchers to improve treatment of neurodegenerative diseases is offering hope that their side-effects may be a thing of the past.
Wits University professors Viness Pillay and Girish Modi have pioneered an interdisciplinary nanoscience-based the-rapeutic approach called Nano-Neuro-Therapeutics to target the treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and motor neuron disease.
With more than eight years of research and over 30 papers published in local and international journals, Pillay and Modi’s designs, methods and pre-clinical tests will be discussed at the university’s 12th Prestigious Research Lecture.
“When we started negotiating and discussing this whole concept, it was more about getting solutions to problems than getting grants or papers out,” Modi said on Wednesday. He is a neurologist and scientist.
“The key was thinking out of the box.”
Despite the millions of people affected by these diseases globally, there is no known or identified cause. Studies have, however, shown that genetics, environmental toxins and age could contribute to their onset.
The first challenge to treating the diseases, Modi said, was finding out the causes – most of which are unknown.
“The second challenge is the mechanism of the disease, which is the way the disease forms. The third is the pathology, which is what the disease leaves you with,” he said.
The cause of treatment failures, he said, was the poor ability to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB), resulting in treatments not reaching targeted sites and patients often experiencing side-effects.
Pillay said: “What we first need to understand is our physiological limitations to current treatment strategies. We have the brain, and around it is a whole massive network of vessels that prevent drugs from getting into the brain.
“When you swallow a tablet, the drug is metabolised in your liver. But once it gets to the BBB, it doesn’t get much further. Even if it does, it has already been inactivated.”
Pillay, who is a pharmaceutical scientist from the School of Therapeutic Sciences, said that for a drug to penetrate the BBB, it has to be a tiny molecule, and even then, less than two percent of those molecules reached the brain.
He said nanomedicine and nanoscience encompassed the engineering of functional materials and devices on the nanometer scale 1 to 100nm.
“The size of a strand of hair or sheet of paper is approximately 100 000nm in thickness. We are working in the range of 1 to 100nm, to put this in perspective. We are working with something you cannot see with the naked eye,” Pillay said.
The professors’ approach included the design of bio-robotic nanoconstructs or nanodevices that are able to successfully cross the BBB and provide targeted and controlled release of neuroactive drugs within the brain.
“It’s not just about getting the drugs in but also getting them to the right site. That’s where this system is cleverly designed… It takes existing knowledge and transforms it into a system that works better, breaching barriers and going to specific sites,” Modi said.
The devices can be im-planted, injected or administered orally.
Their lecture, “Nano-Neuro-Therapeutics: Unravelling Neurodegeneration”, can be heard at Wits’s faculty of health sciences on Tuesday.
The Star