One More Thought on Blood-Brain Barriers…
Anyone in the pharmaceutical development biz knows that one of the biggest problem that drug developers face is drug delivery—how do we get the medicine to go to the right place in the body? If you read my last entry on blood-brain barriers, you might be able to guess that this problem is especially significant for neurological and psychiatric drugs. If we want a drug to actually make it into the nervous system, it has to be able to pass the rather exclusive screening process of the blood-brain barrier. For the most part, only small molecules that are lipid-soluble (i.e. dissolve in oily substances) make it into across the barrier into the oh-so-elite Brain Club. One reason that the drug Lithium Carbonate can be effectively used to treat Bipolar Disorder is because the lithium molecules are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier. Antidepressants, alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine are also able to make it through. Bigger, water-soluble molecules generally do not cross the blood-brain barrier. Unfortunately, it’s these bigger molecules that are most often the ideal drugs for treating chronic neurological conditions. Hopefully, someone will figure out soon how to get around the rules of that snobby blood-brain barrier.
If you want to know more on this topic, here’s an interesting article to check out: http://www.mcmanweb.com/blood_brain.html
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