BALTIMORE —

When treating brain disease, getting medication to the brain is difficult. But after 15 years of development, a Baltimore company now has a solution.

Back in 2010, Dr. Chad Gordon reconstructed skulls in Boston. He noticed that many brain surgery patients ended up with missing fat and muscle in their skull. According to Gordon, 95 to 98% of oral medication never reaches the brain because of the "blood-brain barrier" — a protective layer of cells that surrounds it.

"The brain as an organ is the only one that has blood vessels wrapped with extra cells. That's the barrier," Gordon told 11 News. "So basically, normal chemicals — ones that come out into all your other organs from the bloodstream — don't come out into the brain, because they're trapped by the blood-brain barrier."

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