Focused ultrasound opening brain to previously impossible treatments.
University of Virginia.
While Price, a biomedical engineer, is developing his techniques in the lab, doctors are already using the technology to treat conditions such as Parkinson's tremor.
Price marvels at the approach's specificity. "With MRI, we can look at the target, whether it's a brain tumor or maybe it's a part of the brain we want to do gene therapy on, and we can select it—we can actually make a treatment plan and say, We only want to open the [blood-brain] barrier there. The other 95% of the brain, we don't even touch," said Price, the research director at UVA's Focused Ultrasound Center. "Then, when we apply the focused ultrasound, it opens the barrier there for a few hours. It lets us get the gene therapy across, and then it closes naturally."