Intranasal Nanoemulsions 2025 - PubMed
Sharma et al./PubMed/2025
Why It Matters
This caught my attention because drug delivery—not drug discovery—is often the bottleneck in neurological disease. About 98% of small molecules can't cross the blood-brain barrier, so even effective compounds fail. The nose-to-brain pathway is real anatomy, not speculation, but this is a review paper surveying the landscape, not reporting new human data. Worth watching this space, but we're years from knowing if it works in actual Parkinson's patients.
Key Findings
- The blood-brain barrier blocks most Parkinson's drugs from reaching therapeutic concentrations in the brain, limiting treatment effectiveness
- Intranasal delivery can bypass the blood-brain barrier using direct neural pathways—the olfactory and trigeminal nerves that connect the nasal cavity to the brain
- Nanoemulsions (oil-in-water droplets typically 20-200nm) can increase drug bioavailability and enable targeted delivery to specific brain regions
- Both synthetic drugs and plant-derived compounds have been tested in nanoemulsion formulations for intranasal Parkinson's delivery
- Surface modifications to nanoemulsions (adding specific molecules to the droplet surface) may improve brain targeting and uptake
Read the Paper↗PMID: 39777646