This Nasal-Drop Idea Might Be the First Brain-Cancer Treatment You Don’t Have to Fear

 

 

What if one of the deadliest brain cancers could be treated… through the nose? Yes. The nose. At Washington University School of Medicine, in partnership with Northwestern University, scientists have been working on a brain-cancer treatment that doesn’t require drills, scalpels, screws, or anything else that normally sends us into a mild panic attack. Instead, they’re testing nasal drops carrying tiny nanostructures that can slip straight into the brain and wake up its immune army.

 

This is not the plot of a sci-fi novel accidentally shelved in the medical section. It’s real research, published in PNAS, and it’s focused on glioblastoma: a brutal, fast-moving cancer that affects roughly three out of every 100,000 people in the U.S. and almost always ends badly.

The biggest problem with treating brain cancer has always been the brain itself: specifically, the blood-brain barrier, possibly the world’s most overprotective bouncer. It doesn’t let drugs in. It barely lets nutrients in. But the WashU–Northwestern team decided to try something else: skip the bouncer, sneak in through the nose.

 

The technology at the centre of this is called spherical nucleic acids: little nanostructures invented by Northwestern’s Chad Mirkin. Imagine a microscopic dandelion puff, but instead of seeds you have snippets of DNA or RNA densely packed around a nanoparticle core. Extremely clever, extremely tiny, and capable of delivering drugs more effectively than many traditional methods.

 

These structures carry medicines that activate a pathway called STING (short for stimulator of interferon genes). Glioblastoma tumours are known as “cold tumours,” since the immune system can’t be bothered to notice them. Hot tumours get attention. Cold tumours lurk. To fix this, you need to light a fire under the immune response. STING activation is the match.

 

There’s just one catch: STING-boosting drugs usually fall apart too quickly in the body, and to be even remotely effective, they need to be injected directly into the tumour. Which means countless invasive procedures. That’s where postdoctoral researcher Akanksha Mahajan stepped in and asked the obvious-in-retrospect question: Why not use these spherical nucleic acids to deliver STING-activating drugs noninvasively? It worked in mice.

 

The nose has a direct pathway to the brain along the olfactory nerve. This is normally the route your sense of smell uses, but apparently, nanomedicine can hitch a ride too. No surgery. No terrifying hospital equipment.