Smuggling drugs across the blood-brain barrier

The blood-brain barrier is nature's way of making sure only authorized personnel enter our body's command center, much to the frustration of drug developers who would love to storm the gates and attack neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's where they live. One overused, but appropriate, metaphor for a clever way of bypassing the BBB is the "Trojan Horse" method. Materials Views tells us about a research team in China that is using choline, a molecule abundant in the central nervous system, to smuggle drugs over the border. They're coupling choline with a nanoparticle gene-delivery system. Article