Can Proteomics Help Pierce the Blood-Brain Barrier?
The blood-brain barrier prevents the uptake of drugs from the bloodstream into the brain, and has long been a vexing problem for researchers as well as physicians treating a wide array of diseases. Eric Shusta was recently awarded a four-year, $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for his work on blood-brain barrier membrane proteomics. ProteoMonitor spoke with Shusta to find out about the work. How did you get into studying the blood-brain barrier? I started this all off as somebody who worked with antibody production and antibody engineering. That was my PhD work. And it turned out that I got interested in trying to use antibodies to deliver drugs. That took me to the brain, which was my postdoc work with Bill Pardridge at the University of California, Los Angeles. That’s where I got into this idea of trying to use antibodies to profile the membrane proteome of the blood-brain barrier. Could you describe a bit about the blood-brain barrier and how it presents chal
