Cool Heads Prevail

What do head injuries, strokes and seizures have in common? They can all cause brain damage. Urgent cooling of the brain, triggering hypothermia, protects against this. Physical cooling comes with complications so instead triggering hypothermia with a drug called neurotensin is now being investigated. But it only works if administered directly into the brain as it can’t cross the blood–brain barrier (BBB). So researchers engineered neurotensin with extra bits of protein (peptides) that aid BBB crossing and tested it in a mouse model of epilepsy. Modified neurotensin triggered hypothermia, reduced seizures and reduced inflammation in part of the brain (hippocampus) responsible for learning and memory that shrinks in humans after repeated seizures. Treated mice also performed better in learning and memory tests. The team investigated whether these effects were possible due to neurotensin receptors in the hippocampus, and sure enough fluorescence microscopy of hippocampal neurons (pictured, blue) grown from brain slices revealed they were indeed (red).

Written by Lux Fatimathas

Lux Fatimathas

Writer

Having pursued science through a career in research, communications and publishing, she is currently a writer and editor for a healthcare marketing agency and also juggles freelance science writing.

• Image from work by Lotfi Ferhat and colleagues
• Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Inst Neurophysiopathol, UMR 7051, Marseille, France
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in eLife (reviewed preprint), September 2024