Disease in the central nervous system (CNS) is a challenge to treat with systemic therapies due to the presence of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), which excludes common and novel therapeutics. For example, glioblastoma (GBM) is the most common and aggressive primary brain tumor, with an extremely poor prognosis due to infiltrating tumor cells in areas of normal brain. A primary On-Demand Opening of the BBB 396 challenge of treating this devastating disease is the exclusion of systemic therapies

more »

... rom the CNS. While efforts are being made to develop strategies for designing drugs that can pass through the BBB, there are also efforts to use novel engineering techniques to safely allow any systemic therapy into the CNS and areas of disease. In this chapter, we focus on using high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to circumvent the BBB.