Skip to content

Cancers & treatments

News & evidence

Living with cancer

Learn & contribute

Loading

A public, cited, editable map of oncology: technologies, targets, products, companies, institutions, pathways, trials, pairings, roadmaps, and ideas. One page per object, with a plain-language TL;DR on every page.

Work in progress. Every fact on this site is being built and checked in the open and may be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. You must do your own research and verify anything here at its primary source before relying on it. Nothing on this site is medical advice; decisions belong with you and your clinicians.

OnCo is an information resource, not medical advice. Nothing here replaces a conversation with a qualified clinician. Never delay care because of something you read here; in an emergency, call your local emergency services. Terms of use

Browse by cancer
Tags
Search
Connections
For me
Navigator
Biomarker matrix
Calculators
Interactions
Decision aids
Checkpoint side effects
Tumour board
Compare
Counts by category
Rankings
Timeline
Year by year
Query builder
Graph explorer
Saved
Body map

Cancers & treatments

News & evidence

Institutions & people

Institutions
Universities
Trial leadership
People
Heroes and heroines
Companies
Startups
Requests for startups
Investors
Company scorecards
Trial sponsors
Manufacturing map
Countries
United States deep dive
India deep dive
China deep dive
Germany deep dive
Israel deep dive
United Kingdom deep dive
Cases by country
Funding flows

Living with cancer

For me
The first 60 days
Appointment prep pack
Side effects
Symptom to test
Report reader
Survivorship planner
Second opinion
Financial help
Free in oncology
Paying for care in the US
NHS coverage
Paying for care in India
Coverage rankings
Cutting cancer care costs
Diet, exercise and lifestyle
Supportive care
Recovery and rejuvenation
Complementary and supportive approaches
Hair loss and regrowth
What comes back after treatment
Heroes and heroines

Learn & contribute

Reading paths
About & methodology
Roadmap
Gaps to fill
Coverage of the field
Review queue
Reviewer roster
Contributors
Idea votes
Teaching packs
Weekly issue
Suggest an edit
Answer quality
Data dictionary
Build on OnCo
Open API
Open data
Open tools
Open source in oncology
The software of oncology
GitHub

© 2026 OnCo. Code MIT. The data are free for individual and educational use with the attribution “Data from OnCo (onco.cc)”, under CC BY-NC 4.0. Commercial use must contact us to pay for the data. Commercial licences. Made with heart and soul by Jude Gomila .

About and methodology Corrections Open API Tags Terms of use Privacy policy GitHub

Loading

Home
Ideas
Open the barrier so engineered immune cells can enter the brain

Open the barrier so engineered immune cells can enter the brain

Engineered immune cells given by drip rarely reach brain tumours. Briefly opening the barrier with focused ultrasound at the right moment may let them in.

Overview Connected11

Overview

Most focused ultrasound work has aimed at small molecules and antibodies, but preclinical studies show increased trafficking of natural killer cells and CAR-T cells into brain tumours after sonication. Timing matters because the barrier reseals within hours, so the infusion schedule must be matched to the opening window.

Hypothesis

Sonication immediately before or during cell infusion increases intratumoural engineered cell density in the brain by at least fivefold compared with infusion alone, measurable by imaging or by post-mortem and resection tissue analysis.

Rationale

Cell therapy in brain tumours currently requires direct intratumoural or intraventricular delivery, which limits repeat dosing. If systemic infusion could be made to work, cell therapy in the brain would become far more practical.

Proposed test

Large-animal or first-in-human study pairing radiolabelled or reporter-gene-tagged cell infusion with and without sonication, quantifying brain cell delivery as the primary endpoint.

Maturity

preclinical evidence

Who acts

research

Cost to try

Medium ($1M to $50M)

Years to first evidence

7

Bottlenecks it attacks

The brain: barrier and sanctuary · The blood-brain barrier's tight junctions and efflux pumps keep antibodies, antibody-drug conjugates and most kinase inhibitors out of the brain, so glioblastoma treatment has barely changed since 2005 and brain metastases, which develop in about a fifth of adults with cancer, are usually left to radiotherapy alone.
Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines · Cell therapies take weeks to make for one patient and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isotopes run short.

Connected

Similar pages

Idea
Ultrasound-assisted blood test instead of a brain biopsy
Shares Insightec, Focused-ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening, The brain: barrier and sanctuary, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Idea
Deliver CAR-T cells straight into the fluid around the brain
Shares CAR-T for glioma (IL13Rα2, GD2, EGFRvIII, multi-target), B7-H3, The brain: barrier and sanctuary, CAR-T cell therapy.
Idea
A standard platform to get drugs into the brain: focused ultrasound plus shuttle-engineered therapeutics
Shares Insightec, The brain: barrier and sanctuary, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Idea
Deliver drugs and cells to the brain through the nose
Shares CAR-NK & CAR-macrophage, The brain: barrier and sanctuary, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Technology
Sonodynamic therapy
Shares Insightec, Focused-ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Term
EGFRvIII
Shares CAR-T for glioma (IL13Rα2, GD2, EGFRvIII, multi-target), The brain: barrier and sanctuary, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Trial
Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) Disruption Using Exablate Focused Ultrasound With Doxorubicin for Treatment of Pediatric DIPG
Shares Insightec, Glioma & glioblastoma.
Trial
Blood Brain Barrier (BBB) Disruption Using Exablate Focused Ultrasound With Doxorubicin for Treatment of Pediatric Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Gliomas (DIPG)
Shares Insightec, Glioma & glioblastoma.

cancers

Glioma & glioblastoma

technologies

CAR-NK & CAR-macrophage CAR-T cell therapy CAR-T for glioma (IL13Rα2, GD2, EGFRvIII, multi-target)Focused-ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening Immuno-PET

targets

B7-H3 GD2 (disialoganglioside)

companies

bottlenecks

Manufacturing cost and time for living and radioactive medicines The brain: barrier and sanctuary

ProvenanceLast edited 2026-09-10 · Jude Gomila · Graph health · diff · file · history

Sources & links

Bottleneck evidence (The brain: barrier and sanctuary): Stupp et al., Radiotherapy plus concomitant and adjuvant temozolomide for glioblastoma (NEJM 2005)

Data

Follow this page

Wrong or missing?

Propose a change with a source. Organisations can update their own records. Every suggestion is reviewed, safety-checked and validated before it goes live; nothing is edited directly.

Suggest an editDiscuss start a thread

Out of date?
How review works

Cancers

Glioma & glioblastoma

Technologies

Focused-ultrasound blood-brain barrier opening
CAR-T cell therapy
CAR-T for glioma (IL13Rα2, GD2, EGFRvIII, multi-target)
CAR-NK & CAR-macrophage
Immuno-PET

Targets

B7-H3
GD2 (disialoganglioside)

Companies

Insightec

Not yet reviewedNeeds expert (scientific) review. Review this page or see the review queue and roster.

Model panel commentary is coming to this page: machine commentary, not clinical review.

Machine-readable versions of Open the barrier so engineered immune cells can enter the brain

JSON record with neighbours
Markdown context for language models
RDF Turtle for this record (its triples, relations and owl:sameAs; the IRI of this record is https://onco.cc/ideas/idea-bio2-fus-for-cell-entry/)
All ideas as JSON
RDF N-Triples for the whole corpus
Search index: id, kind, name, TL;DR and route for every record
OpenAPI 3.1 description
API root and meta.json
llms.txt

MCP server: npx -y onco-mcp, tools search, get_entity, list_kind, ask, context, compare. This record is get_entity or context with id idea-bio2-fus-for-cell-entry.

WebMCP tools registered on this page: onco_search, onco_get_entity.