To track the amount and location of the drug delivered by FUS-BBBD, scientists labeled nanoparticles with a radioactive tracer and injected them into the blood circulation following FUS treatment. Then, positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) imaging were employed to measure and visualize the precise amount and location of the nanoparticles in the brain, respectively.
“The caveats to using PET/CT imaging are the associated exposure to radioactivity and higher costs,” explained Chen. The team wanted to find a cheaper, safer way to monitor where drugs go after they cross the BBB, so they explored a technique termed cavitation dose painting through passive cavitation imaging (PCI). The study was published in Scientific Reports.
Yaoheng Yang, the lead author of the study and a graduate student at Washington University, explained that PCI monitors the behavior of microbubbles in the ultrasound field and doesn’t rely on a radioactive particle like PET/CT imaging. Recording the dynamic behavior of the tiny bubbles allows researchers to create a detailed image that can track the location and amount of drug during FUS-BBBD treatment. But the question remained whether the PCI images would correlate to the PET/CT images.
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“Our results demonstrated a pixel-by-pixel correlation between the PET and PCI images,” Chen stated. Chen is hopeful this advance in imaging will push the drug delivery field forward to better precision medicine. The team is calling the new technique cavitation dose painting because it is like “painting by numbers” for drug delivery.
With Chen’s new $1.6 million grant from NIBIB, she plans on fully integrating PCI with FUS-BBBD, so a doctor has full control over drug delivery. “With our new technique, we can predict exactly where a drug will go and how much of it will be released when it gets there. It helps us to minimize a drug harming healthy parts of the brain and avoid ineffective treatments when not enough drug reaches the intended target,” Chen declared.
This work was in part supported by the Children’s Discovery Institute of Washington University and St. Louis Children’s Hospital (grant number MC-II-2017-661), American Cancer Society (grant number IRG-15-170-58), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant R01MH116981 and R01EB027223.
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