Glioblastoma is one of the most dangerous brain cancers in the world. It spreads quickly and is almost always fatal.
Traditional treatments often fail because it’s very hard to get powerful drugs into the brain without using invasive methods like brain surgery or injections into the tumor.
But a new study from scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Northwestern University may change that. They have developed a new way to deliver medicine directly to the brain using simple nose drops.
Glioblastoma starts from brain cells called astrocytes. It’s the most common malignant brain tumor and affects about three out of every 100,000 people in the United States. It grows fast and usually doesn’t trigger a strong immune response.
That makes it very hard to treat with current immune-based therapies. Doctors call tumors like this “cold tumors” because the immune system often doesn’t notice them. In contrast, “hot tumors” attract the immune system and respond better to treatment.
To help the immune system fight glioblastoma, researchers have been trying to activate a defense pathway called STING. This pathway turns on when cells detect strange DNA, and it sends a strong immune signal.
Some drugs can turn on the STING pathway, but they break down quickly and must be injected straight into the brain, which is painful and risky. Patients often need several doses, which makes treatment even harder.
This new study found a way to get around these problems. The team built tiny gold-based particles called spherical nucleic acids (SNAs). These nanostructures are coated with special bits of DNA that can activate the STING pathway.
Instead of injecting them, the scientists delivered these particles through the nose. This method, called intranasal delivery, had been studied before, but this is the first time that a nose-to-brain therapy successfully activated immune cells inside a brain tumor.
To track the particles, the researchers added a glowing tag that let them see where the particles went in the body. They gave the nose drops to mice with glioblastoma and watched the particles move along nerves from the nose to the brain.
The STING-activating DNA triggered immune cells to respond to the tumor. Some immune activity also happened in nearby lymph nodes, but most of the action stayed near the tumor, which helped avoid unwanted side effects.
When the nose-drop treatment was combined with another drug that activates a type of immune cell called T cells, the results were even better. Mice treated with both methods had their tumors completely removed and even developed protection from the cancer returning. This outcome was much stronger than what scientists had seen using other STING drugs alone.
While the treatment is still in early testing, the results are very hopeful. The scientists believe that combining nanodrops with other immune activators may one day offer a noninvasive and powerful treatment for glioblastoma. It could also help treat other cancers that have been hard to reach with traditional therapies.
In reviewing the study, it’s clear that this is a major step forward. The new delivery system avoids invasive procedures, targets the tumor directly, and activates the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. By using simple nose drops, this research may open the door to safer, easier, and more effective treatments in the future.
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The study is published in PNAS.
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