Drug delivery system offers fresh hope to Alzheimer’s patients

SCIENTISTS have found a new way to deliver Alzheimer’s drugs directly to the brain, sparking hopes that more effective treatment could be made available to sufferers.

Efforts to treat the disease have been hampered over the last 50 years by the difficulty of administering drugs to the brain to slow or halt its progression.

But a team of University of Oxford researchers has successfully switched off a gene implicated in Alzheimer’s in the brains of mice by exploiting tiny particles naturally released by cells, called exosomes.