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Zip code for brain injury

A novel peptide targets drugs to injured brain for TBI

August 18, 2016 7:00 AM UTC

Despite the fact that sports concussions and battlefield injuries have raised awareness about traumatic brain injury (TBI), there are still no therapies to treat the disease. A group from Sanford Burnham Prebys has reported in Nature Communications a four-amino acid peptide that specifically binds injured brain tissue, and showed it can deliver drug-sized molecules to damaged brain tissue, raising the prospect of unlocking the benefits of treatments held back by poor PK or toxic effects on healthy tissue.

The principal investigator, Erkki Ruoslahti, a professor at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute known for his discovery of fibronectin and the integrin binding peptide sequence RGD, is spinning out AivoCode and plans to use the tetrapeptide to develop a targeted delivery platform for TBI...