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For patients battling neurodegenerative diseases like ALS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and other dementias, delivering disease-fighting antibody drugs directly to the brain has proven to be a difficult task. Our bodies set up tight walls to prevent infections from spreading to the brain, where they often become fatal.

Unfortunately, this protective feature also prevents us from getting drugs into the brain. Approximately 1 in 10,000 antibodies injected into patients actually makes it to the brain, with these cellular fighters trapped in the blood rather than escaping through cracks in the blood vessels into the brain.

Now, researchers have mapped out a new transit process to enable drugs to reach the brain using extracellular vesicles—tiny bubbles naturally produced by cells in our bodies.

Researchers at the University of Ottawa showed that extracellular vesicles find a way to squeeze through blood vessels into the brain, allowing them to deliver drugs there. As a next step, they wanted to find ways to improve the ability of antibodies in the brain to eliminate the pathological proteins that cause neurodegenerative diseases.

"Normal antibodies can attach themselves to the disease-causing proteins in these diseases, but they can't eliminate them and so aren't as potent as they could be," explains Dr. Derrick Gibbings, a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa).

Autophagy is the body's natural recycling plant, collecting waste from the cell and breaking it up into small pieces that can be reused to build other things useful to cells.

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