Parkinson’s disease is an incurable neurodegenerative condition, affecting millions of people in the world. It is one of the leading causes of age-related dementia as well as a very common cause of disability or death.
Now scientists at the University of York are pushing to make a nasal spray treatment for patients with Parkinson’s disease.
While Parkinson’s disease is incurable, it doesn’t mean that there are no treatment options. Symptomatic treatment is possible, even if it is not too effective, and it does improve the quality of life of the patients. The problem is that these drugs lose their effectiveness over time, because the body simply learns to break them down even before they have the opportunity to reach the brain. Therefore, the dosage is increased over time, pills are replaced with injections and with time the condition worsens anyway. Nasal spray could be a more effective solution, working through the nerves that service the nose.
Nasal spray delivers gel into the patient's nose, which sticks long enough to release the drugs. Image credit: NIAID via Wikimedia (CC BY 2.0)
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A big challenge for scientists was finding a medium, which would stick in the nose long enough for an effective release of the drug. That is why now scientists have created a gel with a drug called levodopa. Levodopa is converted to dopamine in the brain, at least partially making up for the deficit of dopamine-producing cells in Parkinson’s patients. The new nasal spray was tested with animal models and the results are very promising – drugs from the gel were released very precisely into the blood and reached the brain. This was because the gel stuck around the nasal cavity for long enough for the drugs to be released properly. Because levodopa is delivered so close to the brain, the dosage doesn’t need to be that high, because the body doesn’t have enough time to break it down.
Khuloud Al-Jamal, one of the authors of the study from King’s College London, said: “Not only did the gel perform better than a simple solution, but the brain uptake was better than that achieved using intravenous injection of the drug. This suggests that nasal delivery of Parkinson’s drugs using this type of gel may have clinical relevance.”
Scientists are now developing a new device, which would be able to deliver the gel precisely and would be easy enough to use for humans. Clinical trials will then follow. The end result could be an effective Parkinson’s drug delivery method, which would reduce the need for high dosages and injections.
This is not going to cure Parkinson’s. However, a nasal spray solution could be a more comfortable and more effective option for millions of patients. Hopefully, scientists will confirm the method’s effectiveness in clinical trials.
Source: University of York