Comments in response to an article entitled, “Nanoparticle ‘cage’ allows for safe, noninvasive, precise drug delivery in the brain”

First off, this article was published in 2018. Ultrasound-guided drug delivery for a number of applications (i.e., cancer) had already been well-established by this point in time. The way in which this article is written makes it sound like this is a completely new modality – which it just is not. They even state within this article that it “could work” to combat cancer. That is true. It could work because it had already been show to do so.

It was said that the nanoparticles are biocompatible. Biocompatible in comparison to what? Biocompatibility is a spectrum and must be compared against some standard. For example, if you state that it is biocompatible this must mean at some concentration and for some duration. These details are lacking in this article. Furthermore, it was said that the nanoparticle complex had been approved for at least human use by the FDA and so they are optimistic about the translational potential. It does not matter that the individual constituents have FDA-approved applications. The proportional balance could be different. The absolute concentrations could be different, and so on. The picture used was lackluster as well.

Here is a nice YouTube video of ultrasound-guided technology that was published even a year before this article was published.