A ULB team has discovered how blood vessels in the brain are formed and how they differ from other vessels in the body. A major breakthrough that could lead to new therapeutic approaches.
Cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and stroke, is the world’s leading cause of death, claiming around 18 million lives a year. This observation justifies the adage that you are only as old as your arteries, and explains why researchers are constantly striving to understand how the cardiovascular system develops and functions.
Led by Prof. Benoit Vanhollebeke - Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Faculty of Science, Université libre de Bruxelles and recent winner of the 2024 Lambertine Lacroix Prize for Cardiovascular Diseases - a team from ULB has just made an important discovery. Contrary to the generally accepted idea that blood vessels are formed in a similar way throughout the body, Giel Schevenels and his colleagues have discovered that those irrigating the brain obey different and unprecedented rules. In fact, the researchers have discovered that cerebral vessels are equipped with a specific enzyme that is essential for them to invade the brain. Their study was published in Nature on April 3, 2024.
"What I find interesting in this study is that the control of cerebral vascularization that we are revealing simultaneously enables the vessels to acquire specific properties adapted to the cerebral environment, known as the blood-brain barrier. So there seems to be a functional alignment between the very birth of the vessels and their specific functions ", explains Benoit Vanhollebeke.
The blood-brain barrier is a set of features of the brain’s blood vessels that severely restrict exchanges between blood and brain tissue. The identification of this mechanism gives us hope that it will one day be possible to develop therapeutic approaches specifically targeting cerebral vessels, which represents a major clinical challenge in many neurological pathologies," concludes the researcher.