Macrophage express to the brain

Whereas Pedro Lowenstein of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center hopes to use gene therapy to deliver FMS-like tyrosine kinase 3 ligand (FLT3LG; FLT3L) to treat brain tumors, a University of South Florida team has hit upon an alternative approach for getting protein therapeutics into the brain-macrophage precursors.³

In a paper published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience, the Florida group showed that macrophage precursors transfected with a therapeutic transgene ex vivo and then transplanted back into mice could penetrate the brain to sites of injury and inflammation and deliver a b-amyloid (Ab)-busting protein to inflamed Alzheimer's disease (AD) lesions...