Sonobiopsy for expanding the application of therapeutic ultrasound in the diagnosis of brain diseases

Abstract

Focused ultrasound (FUS) was introduced for brain applications in the 1940s and has been employed as a therapeutic tool since then. FUS-mediated thermal ablation treatment of essential tremors was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2016. FUS combined with microbubbles for inducing BBB disruption to deliver neurotherapeutic drugs to the brain is currently in early-phase clinical trials. We proposed to use FUS as a brain disease molecular diagnostic tool. Sonobiopsy uses FUS to release brain disease-specificbiomarkers (e.g., DNA, RNA, and proteins) from the brain to the blood for the diagnosis of brain diseases by blood tests. Sonobiopsy does not involve any neurotherapeutic drugs, which may accelerate FDA approval of the FUS technique. Sonobiopsy opens new research opportunities that have the potential to substantially improve the diagnosis of a broad spectrum of brain tumors. This talk will present recent progress in the development of sonobiopsy technique for the diagnosis of brain cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. This talk also will present recent achievements in the clinical translation of sonobiopsy.