Maximizing local access to therapeutic deliveries in glioblastoma. Part IV: Image-guided, remote-controlled opening of the blood-brain barrier for systemic brain tumor therapy

Abstract

Disease in the central nervous system (CNS) is a challenge to treat with systemic therapies due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which excludes common and novel therapeutics. For example, glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive primary brain tumor, with an extremely poor prognosis due to infiltrating tumor cells in areas of normal brain. A primary challenge of treating this devastating disease is the exclusion of systemic therapies from the CNS. While efforts are being made to develop strategies for designing drugs that can pass through the BBB, there are also efforts to use novel engineering techniques to safely allow any systemic therapy into the CNS and areas of disease. In this chapter, we focus on using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to circumvent the BBB.