Stopping Brain Aneurysms: A New Way with an Old Drug

Intracranial aneurysms (IAs) are scary — they can affect up to 5% of people and often lead to severe bleeding in the brain. We don't have medicines to stop them from growing or busting. Recently, researchers found that IAs might be a chronic inflammation issue where immune cells, called macrophages, sneak into brain arteries using a specific signaling pathway called the CCL2-CCR2 axis. A protein called FROUNT helps this process. Scientists think blocking FROUNT with an old drug used for alcohol treatment, disulfiram, could keep these macrophages out and maybe even stop IAs from growing.They tested this in labs and in rats with IAs. They saw that disulfiram stopped macrophages from getting in, which slowed down or even stopped the growth of IAs in rats. This shows that interrupting this signaling chain with drugs could be a new way to treat people with IAs.