New research suggests that chemotherapy could better target brain tumors in mouse models when it was administered at night instead of during the day. That’s because the blood-brain barrier was more likely to allow the chemotherapy to pass through it at night. The findings highlight the importance of this area of research in humans, and one day, they could help to improve outcomes in patients with brain tumors.

William Walker — a researcher with the West Virginia University School of Medicine — is investigating whether the blood-brain barrier is more likely to admit chemotherapy drugs at different times of day.

His study — funded by the National Institutes of Health — shows that the blood-brain barrier is dynamic rather than static and suggests that properly timed chemotherapy treatments could better reach the tumors they’re targeting.

«We are not the first ones to show that chrono-chemotherapy is beneficial, but we’re the first to show that it’s beneficial in the treatment of brain metastasis,» said Walker, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neuroscience.

His findings appeared in «Frontiers in Oncology.»

Walker and his colleagues delivered chemotherapy into mice that had breast cancer, which had traveled to the brain.

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