NeuroTrans™ Program: Designed to Deliver Therapeutics
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Nearly 1,000 known genetic and neurodegenerative diseases affect the brain. Drugs often have difficulty reaching these disease-affected areas because the brain has evolved a protective barrier, commonly referred to as the blood-brain barrier.
Part of the solution to the medical problem of neurodegenerative diseases is the creation of effective brain targeting and delivery technologies. One of the most obvious ways of delivering therapeutics to the brain is via the brain's extensive vascular network. Treating these diseases by delivering therapeutics into the brain in a minimally invasive way, including through a natural receptor mediated transport mechanism called transcytosis (see sidebar), is a vision shared by both scientists and physicians.
Learn more about NeuroTrans™:
NeuroTrans™ Delivery Across the Blood-Brain Barrier
NeuroTrans™ is our proprietary RAP-based technology program to research the delivery of therapeutics across the blood-brain barrier. We believe our NeuroTrans™ platform may provide therapies that will be safer, less intrusive and more effective than current approaches in treating a wide variety of brain disorders. To date Raptor holds three issued patents related to this platform.
In preclinical studies, NeuroTrans™ has been conjugated to a variety of protein drugs, including enzymes and growth factors, without interfering with the function of either fusion partner (Prince 2004). Studies indicate that radio-labeled NeuroTrans™ may be transcytosed across the blood-brain barrier and, that fusions between NeuroTrans™ and therapeutic proteins may be manufactured economically (Pan 2004).
Learn more about Raptor's other preclinical programs:
Transcytosis
Transcytosis involves the selective receptor-mediated transport of peptides and large proteins across the endothelial membrane in the blood-brain barrier. This process is responsible for delivering a wide variety of natural blood proteins such as cytokines, lipoproteins, transferrin and hormones such as insulin to the brain as these proteins are needed by brain tissue for normal brain function. The endothelial cells of the blood-brain barrier operate a number of specific transcytosis transport systems to satisfy this need.