2024-04-06 13:10:06
A groundbreaking study by Professor Benoit Vanhollebeke and his team reveals that brain blood vessels have a unique developmental process, paving the way for targeted therapies in neurological diseases.
Cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attacks and strokes, are the leading causes of death worldwide, killing around 18 million people each year. This observation justifies the adage that we are as old as our arteries and explains why researchers work tirelessly to understand how the cardiovascular system develops and functions.
Led by Professor Benoit Vanhollebeke – Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Faculty of Sciences, Free University of Brussels and recent winner of the 2024 Lambertine Lacroix Prize for Cardiovascular Diseases – a team from ULB has just made an important discovery. Contrary to the generally accepted idea that blood vessels form in a similar way throughout the body, Giel Schevenels and his colleagues discovered that those that supply blood to the brain obey different, completely new rules. Researchers have discovered that brain vessels are equipped with a specific enzyme that is essential for them to invade the brain. The results were recently published in the journal Nature.
The blood-brain barrier and future therapeutic approaches
“What I find remarkable in this study is that the mechanism of cerebral angiogenesis that we simultaneously reveal allows the vessels to acquire specific properties adapted to the neuronal environment, called the blood-brain barrier. There therefore seems to be a functional alignment between the very birth of the vessels and their specific functions,” explains Benoit Vanhollebeke.
The blood-brain barrier is a set of characteristics of the brain’s blood vessels that severely limit exchanges between blood and brain tissue. This protects the brain from toxic compounds circulating in the blood.
“The identification of this mechanism gives us hope that it will one day be possible to develop therapeutic approaches specifically targeting cerebral vessels, which constitute an important clinical issue in many neurological pathologies,” concludes the researcher.
The research of Professor Vanhollebeke’s laboratory has been supported in recent years by the ERC, the FNRS, the Queen Elisabeth Medical Foundation, the ULB Foundation and Welbio.
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