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Abstract
Effective delivery of therapeutic agents into the brain can greatly improve the treatments of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. Application of focused ultrasound facilitated by microbubbles has shown the potential to deliver drugs across the blood–brain barrier into targeted sites within the brain noninvasively. This review provides a summary of the technological background and principle, highlights of recent significant developments and research progress, as well as a critical commentary on the challenges and future directions in the field. This review also outlines and discusses the tasks that researchers face in order to successfully translate the technology into a clinical reality, including obtaining improved understanding of the mechanisms, demonstration of therapeutic efficacy and safety for specific applications, and development of methodology for rational design to achieve optimized and consistent outcomes.
Financial & competing interests disclosure
Financial support from the University of Michigan and the United States National Institutes of Health is duly acknowledged. The author has no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.
No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.