Parasite engineered to treat neurological disease in mice: Study

The human physique works laborious to forestall outdoors substances from coming into the mind — which makes it a problem to get medicine into the mind to deal with neurological ailments. A research revealed at the moment in Nature Microbiology opens the door to a possible intelligent answer, exhibiting how Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that is ready to cross the blood-brain barrier, will be engineered to deal with a mind improvement dysfunction in mice.

Shahar Bracha, a postdoctoral fellow on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how, and colleagues engineered the parasite to make and secrete a number of giant therapeutic proteins as soon as it was contained in the mouse brains. These proteins wouldn’t have been in a position to cross the blood-brain barrier on their very own.

By “copying notes from evolution,” Bracha stated, her group was in a position to “take an answer that already existed in nature” to deal with mice with Rett syndrome — a mind improvement dysfunction brought on by a mutation within the MeCP2 gene. In people, Rett syndrome impacts women, who expertise points with coordination, communication, and motion ranging from as early as their first yr of life.