We got over a foot of snow last night, and the roads were pretty slushy. I haven't ever seen it snow this much since I got here, and everyone keeps saying that it's unusual for the snow to be this bad in Cleveland. I was sinking in to the tops of my boots. I had wanted to go to surgery grand rounds this morning, so I got up really early. But I still got there a little late. The seminar was about how to decrease the risk to patients who are undergoing surgery by having a medical consultant evaluate them first. Not the most exciting seminar I've ever seen. But the speaker must have been someone big, because they made up posters for him and put them up all over the Lerner Institute.
A lot of my classmates didn't make it to our class seminar because of the snow. It's too bad, because I thought it was a pretty good seminar. The speaker was talking about how we can get drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the brain. The problem is that only small, nonpolar compounds can easily cross the blood-brain barrier, but many neurological and psychiatric diseases cannot be treated with these kinds of drugs. It's an interesting problem. Only half of my group showed up for PBL, so we finished a little early because we had fewer presentations than we had expected.
My throat is still hurting. The good news it that the snow has finally stopped though, and it's actually sunny outside right now.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
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2 comments:
how about biodegradable nanoparticles loaded with drugs. One can control for size, polarity, hydro and lipo philicity/phobicity, receptor specificity, release duration, and it is even possible to decorate them with some sort of contrast agents for traffic tracking.
I think the problem with them is that they're too nonselective. The advantage of using these kind of Trojan horse molecules is that they bind to specific receptors on brain and endothelial cells and don't get taken up by other cells that lack those receptors.
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