Aggie research team working on anti-seizure nasal spray – Bryan-College Station Eagle

Researchers at Texas A&M University's Health Science Center are working to develop new ways to minimize brain damage in seizure patients using a nasally administered compound to decrease potentially harmful swelling.

The team's research was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where the researchers explained the principles being used in the study.

Texas A&M College of Medicine and Associate Director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine Ashok K. Shetty, who served as a co-senior author of the study, said the work specifically looked at the effects of a nasal compound using vesicles, isolated from adult stem cells, on preventing brain damage caused by the seizure disorder status epilepticus -- a condition that can causes single seizures of more than 30 seconds or a series of seizures during which consciousness is lost.

"Clinically [status epilepticus] is a medical emergency," Shetty said. "Typically, neurologists give a combination of anti-epileptic drugs to stop the seizures, but whatever damage the seizures are doing leads to inflammation in the brain -- which those drugs do not typically treat...In this case, we nasally injected [the compound] and it resulted in suppression of the inflammation which caused multiple beneficial effects on the brain."

In a statement, Texas A&M College of Medicine professor Darwin J. Prockop, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine and co-senior author of the study alongside Shetty, described the protection of the brain from injury or disease as "one of the holy grails of medicine."

Shetty said Prockop and his team developed a new method of isolating the specific vesicles -- removed from cultures of adult mesenchymal stem cells -- used for the anti-inflammatory nasal compound.

By removing the vesicles from the stem cells, Shetty said the beneficial properties are able to be delivered without dealing with some of the challenges posed by using the entire stem cell.

"These vesicles are extremely small and can pass through a number of barriers, avoiding some of the disadvantages of using stem cells," Shetty said.

Shetty also said the use of a nasal spray as the delivery method was particularly effective in this case, thanks to its ability to "deliver drugs easily into the brain."

"[Using the intranasal administration] is beneficial because there is a communication between the nasal mucus membrane and the brain, so it can move to the brain without having to pass the blood-brain barrier," Shetty said.

In addition to being a noninvasive treatment, Shetty said other benefits of the nasal compound include its ability to be stored and administered locally in a doctor's office as well as its effectiveness in preventing damage if delivered in at least the first two hours after a seizure occurs.

In the animal model testing conducted by the team thus far, Shetty said the treatment has show positive results in its ability to easy inflammation in the brain.

Moving forward, Shetty said the research probably will look toward other benefits the anti-inflammatory nasal spray may have for brain ailments such as Parkinson's disease, traumatic brain injuries, multiple sclerosis and, specifically, Alzheimer's disease.

"The next step is scaling up and testing [the compound] in Alzheimer's disease models," Shetty said. "Inflammation in the brain is one of the major problems with Alzheimer's disease, especially in the early stages. It starts off as inflammation, and then all the other [symptoms] start to show up. If you can suppress inflammation very early in the disease, it may be possible to block the progress of disease or at least delay it."

Despite its promise thus far, Prockop noted that there are still questions that need to be addressed and a "great deal of further work" to go before the treatment is safely ready for human testing.

Read the rest here:
Aggie research team working on anti-seizure nasal spray - Bryan-College Station Eagle