United States: Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer disease in the world today all across the globe. One common cause is the end result of plaque in the arteries, inflammation, and potentially fatal heart attacks.
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The Michigan State University’s researchers have put forward a new treatment approach for treating arterial plaque inflammation: nanotherapy.
The new therapy is able to target exactly the sites within the arteries that are inflamed.
This makes the immune system come in, thus helping in the breakdown of the plaque as well as removal.
Plaque formation and therapy
Plaque formation in the artery is of two forms. It can cause 95 percent ~ 99 percent blockages. Occasionally, a person undergoes some signs and symptoms, which may be chest pain or pressure, nausea, or dizziness before such blockage.
This can be treated with stents to bring up the blood flow. The other is highly inflammatory and can rupture and lead to heart attacks.
As per Bryan Smith, an associate professor in the College of Engineering and MSU’s Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering, “That’s the scarier one that leads to most heart attacks,” interestingengineering.com reported.
“Because such plaques don’t necessarily block much of the artery, and because the effects of the rupture can very suddenly completely block blood flow, such a heart attack can seem to appear as if from nowhere,” Smith said.
The new nanotherapy is aimed at such types of plaques as this one – extremely dangerous. Their infusion, called nanotherapy, was constructed by the team from nanoparticles, which are materials thinner than hair.
The nanotherapy identified a certain kind of immune cell within the plaque and aimed at this area. When the nanotherapy gets to these immune cells, it then awakens them and enhances their performance. The activated immune cells then start to ‘digest’ the core of the plaque, if you like, as they break it down.
Thus, in addition to eliminating the deposits as the plaque, the nanotherapy also decreases inflammation within the blood vessel. To demonstrate the efficiency, safety and possible adverse effects of the nanotherapy, the researchers used one pig.
The treatment used proved that it could significantly lessen the inflammation of plagues without provoking adverse side effects.
“Using PET [positron-emission tomography] scans, we were able to measure the effects of the therapy on pig arteries,” Smith added.