An international team has developed a potentially safer way to monitor drug delivery to the brain. 

Mapping drugs in the brain and assessing how well they reach it are both vitally important for testing new pharmaceuticals for brain diseases. But until now, this could be done only by using radioactive chemicals, which are expensive and risk human safety. 

In their search for a lower risk alternative, Rumiana Bakalova of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Chiba, Japan, and colleagues in Japan and Bulgaria have developed a non-radioactive way to monitor conventional drugs in the brain. By attaching nitroxyl radicals to the anticancer drug lomustine they found that its movement into the brain could be tracked using magnetic resonance imaging. 

Adding the nitroxyl radicals does not affect the drug's movement through the blood-brain barrier, which is a crucial step for the drug, explains Bakalova. 'We observed that the drug was localised in the brain tissue and were able to map the drug localisation in different parts of the brain,' she says. This information could be useful for planning chemo- and radiotherapy of cancer and other diseases, she adds. 

Baklova's team now plans to look into using the labelling for other dugs and also to map drugs in different organs and tissues in the body. 

Sarah Dixon

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