Being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s is one of the most dreaded news that a patient can receive.
It’s a painful descent into forgetfulness that is especially painful for the patient’s family. But a team from West Virginia University’s Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute just made a breakthrough that gives hope to Alzheimer’s sufferers around the world.
Dr. Ali R. Rezai is one of the neurosurgeons who successfully performed a phase II trial that used focused ultrasound on a patient with an early stage of the disease.
Dr. Rezai said, “For Alzheimer’s, there are not that many treatments available, despite hundreds of clinical trials over the past two decades and billions of dollars spent.”
The WVU team collaborated with Israeli medical technology company INSIGHTEC to test the groundbreaking technique. The US FDA gave approval for INSIGHTEC to proceed with the phase II clinical trial earlier this year and the WVU Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute was chosen as the place where the trial would take place.
Researchers at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto already noted last summer that a phase I safety trial on Alzheimer’s patients would reversibly open the blood-brain barrier.
The WVU team used ultrasound waves emitted through a specialized helmet that had more than 1,000 probes focused on a certain spot in the brain along with microscopic bubbles, explained Rezai.
“And when we put a different frequency of ultrasound on the bubbles, they start oscillating,” he said.
The brain-blood barrier is nearly impenetrable but the experimental procedure opened it up.
“It’s protected on one end for us to function but also prevents larger molecules or chemotherapy or medications or antibodies or immune system cells or amino therapy or stem cells to get in,” he said.
The West Virginia team took aim at the hippocampus and the areas of the brain that have plaques that Alzheimer’s patients have.
“Plaques are these clusters of proteins that accumulate and they block-up the brain’s connectivity,” Rezai said. “In animal studies, it showed that these plaques are cleared with ultrasound technology.”
Judi Polak was their first patient. She’s a West Virginia health care worker and used to work as a nurse at WVU Children’s Hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
“I think that with Alzheimer’s there’s so much in the unknown and I’ve been with Health Science for a long time and I understand that we need to be able to step forward and look into the future,” Polak said.
Polak was first diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s five years ago.
“That took me a while to deal with,” Polak admitted. “It was hard to say that I have Alzheimer’s. I didn’t want to be the person who felt sorry for myself and so we looked at clinical trials as a way to help not only me but other people too.”
Polak had always been willing to participate in studies and experimental treatments just hoping that one of them would offer her a cure. But this also took an emotional toll on her husband of 36 years, Mark Polak.
Referring to a drug-placebo trail several years ago at the University of Pittsburgh, Mark said with contempt, “Guess what, the drug didn’t work. Just like every drug that has been tried doesn’t work.”
But the Polak’s persistence seems to be bearing fruit because the WVU procedure opened her blood-brain barrier for an unprecedented 36 hours.
Mark said, “It was opened longer than they expected. They were actually, I think both excited and scared. The team was ecstatic.”
Although it will take several years to fully evaluate the efficacy of the treatments, everyone is hopeful.
“I am hopeful that focused ultrasound opening of the blood-brain barrier will prove to be a valuable treatment option for Judi Polak and other patients with early Alzheimer’s who are confronting the enormous challenges associated with the disease on a daily basis,” Rezai said.
However, Rezai stopped short of saying that the treatment had an immediate effect. But Polak herself has noticed a difference.
“I think I could speak clearer and did not wait as long in answering questions,” she said. “Sometimes in the past things would leave my mind and I couldn’t remember things.”
One other person who is hopeful is Mark, who said, “This is man on the moon stuff. Maybe we’re on to something.”
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