Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by _Adam 1204 days ago
Key point I think should be more prominent:

The effect was on cultured brain cells. The reason brain tumors and other disorders of the brain are so hard to treat is that the blood-brain barrier keeps many big molecules out. That doesn't mean the molecule isn't therapeutically relevant, only that there's a ways to go to making it useful for actual humans/mice and not just cells in a petri dish.

Still a fascinating discovery and I look forward to more research.

Edit: Not totally true, the actual study link has more details.

>We further found that dietary supplementation with H. erinaceus crude extract significantly enhanced recognition memory.

The human BBB may still be an obstacle but I'm sure we'll see more studies soon.